THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


t 


, 


JOSEPH    GREEK    AND 
HIS    DAUGHTER 


BY  ME.  WEBSTER 


THE  REAL  ADVENTURE 

THE  PAINTED  SCENE 

THE  THOROUGHBRED 

AN  AMERICAN  FAMILY 

MARY  WOLLASTON 

REAL  LIFE 


JOSEPH  GREEK  AND 
HIS  DAUGHTER 

A  Novel 

By 
HENRY  KITCHELL  WEBSTER 


oar 


INDIANAPOLIS 

THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 


COPYRIGHT,   1922 
BY  THE  PICTORIAL  REVIEW  COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT,    1922 
BY  THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America. 


PRESS  OF 

BRAUNWORTH    &   CO 

BOOK    MANUFACTURERS 

BROOKLYN,    N.    Y. 


AUTHOR'S  NOTE 

Joe  Greer's  stories  of  the  South  American  jungle  are 
not  inventions  of  my  own.  They  are  a  few  that  have  been 
told  me  at  odd  times  by  my  friend,  F.  "W.  Updegraff  of 
Elmira,  New  York,  the  narrative  of  whose  wanderings 
among  the  tributaries  of  the  upper  Amazon  is,  I  under 
stand,  presently  to  be  published.  If  it  has  the  charm  of 
his  spoken  word,  it  will  be  an  entrancing  tale. 

I  wish  to  add  my  assurance  that  no  other  items  of  Joe's 
experience  or  of  his  character  have  been  derived  from  Mr. 
Updegraff  or  from  anybody  else  I  know.  Joseph  Greer, 
like  all  the  other  characters  in  this  novel,  is,  with  the  ex 
ception  noted,  wholly  fictitious. 

H.  K.  W. 


v3ir 

.5 


JOSEPH    GREEK    AND 
HIS   DAUGHTER 


CHAPTER  ONE 


THE  PAWN- 


ON  THE  face  of  it,  John  "Williamson 's  invitation  to  lunch 
was  nothing  that  Henry  Craven  need  especially  wonder, 
let  alone  worry,  about.  It  was  unusual — Henry  couldn't 
remember,  indeed,  that  it  had  ever  happened  before  in 
just  these  circumstances — but  surely  one  needn't  feel  on 
that  account  that  there  was  anything  ominous  about  it. 
The  manner  of  giving  it  had  been  a  little  overbearing, 
perhaps;  high-handed,  anyhow.  But  that  was  John  Will 
iamson's  way,  and  no  doubt  his  place  in  Chicago's  finan 
cial  world  entitled  him  to  it. 

Henry  had  been  dictating  a  letter — around  eleven 
o'clock  this  was — when  one  of  the  bank's  more  important 
customers  spoke  to  him  from  across  the  marble  rail.  Evi 
dently  the  man  didn't  care  to  come  inside,  so  Henry  went 
to  the  rail  to  see  what  was  wanted.  His  telephone  rang 
while  he  stood  talking  with  the  customer  and,  of  course, 
his  stenographer  answered  it.  He  heard  her  say,  "Yes, 
Mr.  Williamson."  And  then,  "He's  right  here.  Shan't  I 
call  him?"  But  John, . evidently,  hadn't  thought  it  neces 
sary  to  wait,  even  a  minute.  There  was  another  pause 

1 


while  she  made  a  notation  on  a  pad,  and  finally,  "Very 
well,  Mr.  Williamson,  I'll  teU  him." 

She  softened  it  up  as  well  as  she  could  when  she  trans 
mitted  the  message,  but  he  saw  that  what  she'd  written 
on  her  pad  was:  "Be  at  J.  "W.'s  office  at  twelve-thirty. 
Lunch."  No  "if's"  at  all.  Not  even  an  "if  possible." 

Well,  of  course  there  were  no  "if's."  John  was  one  of 
two  or  three  Olympians  who,  among  their  other  cloudy 
vast  affairs,  directed  the  policies  of  this  great  bank  in 
which  his  cousin-by-marriage,  Henry  Craven,  after  six 
teen  years  of  faithful  service,  had  recently  been  promoted 
to  be  one  of  the  assistant  cashiers.  Naturally,  then,  if 
John  wanted  him  for  any  reason,  big  or  little,  Henry 
would  come. 

It  was  unlikely,  wasn't  it,  that  the  thing  was  of  any 
serious  importance.  It  mightn't  be  a  business  matter  at 
all.  Some  little  domestic  problem  or  other.  Violet  (she 
was  John's  wife  and  Henry's  cousin)  had  a  birthday 
coming  next  week.  It  was  possible  that  Henry's  culti 
vated  taste  was  going  to  be  requisitioned  to  pick  out  a 
present  for  her.  Only,  would  John  have  wasted  a  price 
less  lunch  hour — the  most  important  hour  of  his  hard- 
driven  day — upon  a  trifle  like  that?  It  was  inconceiv 
able.  The  lunch  table  was  just  where  men  like  John 
talked  over  and  arrived  at  their  major  decisions. 

Yet  what  major  decision  of  John's  could  imaginably 
concern  Henry?  Unless — unless  it  was  a  question  of 
Henry's  own  job  in  the  bank.  They  weren't  going  to 
promote  him  again;  they'd  just  done  that.  But  sup 
pose — suppose  they  felt  he  hadn't  made  good,  and  had 
decided  to  do  the  other  thing.  Wouldn't  it  be  broken 
to  him  just  like  this,  genially,  over  the  lunch  table?  And 
wouldn't  this,  for  that  matter,  account  for  John's  unwill 
ingness  to  have  him  called  to  the  phone? 

He  pulled  himself  up  with  a  jerk  and  shot  a  glance  at 
his  stenographer.  Had  his  moment  of  panic  been  legible 
to  her  in  his  face?  But  she  was  gazing  out  nowhere  in 
the  sort  of  trance  that  is  one  of  the  accomplishments  of 
her  profession,. 


THE  PAWN  3 

"What's  the  last  thing  I  said?"  he  demanded.  Then 
as  the  girl  started  to  read,  "No,  give  me  the  whole  thing 
from  the  beginning." 

He  didn't  need  it  but  he  did  need  another  minute  or 
two  in  which  to  take  possession  of  himself.  That  fear — 
that  damnable  black  dog  of  a  fear  had  slunk  at  his  heels 
since  his  first  day  at  the  bank. 

It  had  been  natural  enough  at  first,  when  he  was  bruised 
and  bewildered  by  a  sudden  tragic  change  in  the  whole 
prospect  of  his  life.  John  had  given  him  this  job  out  of 
charity,  or,  if  you  preferred  putting  it  so,  by  way  of 
meeting  an  obligation  he  had  assumed  on  marrying  into 
the  Craven  family.  He'd  come  into  the  bank  as  a  lame 
duck. 

There  was,  though,  no  reasonable  doubt  that  he  stayed 
and  advanced  on  his  merits.  All  the  evidence  leaned  that 
way.  But  the  fear  persisted.  Not,  of  course,  as  a  con 
stant  companion.  There  were  days,  weeks  of  them  to 
gether  sometimes,  when  he  never  thought  of  it.  But  at 
some  trifling  enigma,  fancied  very  likely,  in  the  conduct 
of  one  of  his  superiors,  some  conversation  unavoidably 
half  overheard,  some  smile  that  he  felt  glanced  his  way, 
the  thing  would  seize  him  like  a  spasm  of  pain  from  an 
injured  nerve. 

He  knew  it  was  a  weakness.  He  made  valiant  attempts 
to  conquer  it.  He  grew  ashamed  of  it.  He  developed  the 
corollary  fear  that  it  would  be  discovered. 

His  latest  promotion  had,  he'd  supposed,  worked  a  cure. 
An  assistant  cashier  was  one  of  the  officers  of  the  bank. 
"If  ever  they  make  me  an  officer,"  he  had  said  to  him 
self  a  thousand  times,  "then  I'll  know  I'm  safe."  And 
indeed,  during  the  three  months  since  it  had  occurred, 
he'd  been  breathing  deeper,  luxuriating  in  a  new  se 
curity. 

But  now,  for  no  better  reason  than  that  his  cousin 
John  had  invited  him  to  lunch,  he  was  quaking  at  the 
pit  of  his  stomach  like  a  schoolboy  who's  been  told  to 
report  to  the  principal.  It  was  absurd.  He  laughed  at 
the  absurdity,  and  then  kicked  the  recurrent  question — 


4  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

what,  after  all,  did  John  want  of  him — out  of  his  mind 
and  vigorously  resumed  the  dictation  of  his  letter. 

At  twelve-thirty  precisely  he  opened  the  door  to  John 
Williamson's  suite  of  offices.  These  occupied  a  corner  of 
the  top  floor  of  the  bank  building.  The  girl  at  the  tele 
phone  board  greeted  Henry  politely  and  asked  him  to 
come  in  and  sit  down.  Mr.  "Williamson  was  engaged  just 
now  but,  she  thought,  wouldn't  keep  him  waiting  long. 
So  Henry  sat  down,  in  his  overcoat,  upon  the  chair  she 
indicated  to  him. 

A  desire  came  flooding  over  him  as  he  sat  upon  that 
straight  chair  in  the  outer  office,  both  feet  square  on  the 
floor,  his  Derby  hat  balanced  primly  upon  his  knees,  and, 
for  something  to  do,  breathed  upon  and  polished  his  eye 
glasses  assiduously  over  and  over  again, — a  passionate  de 
sire  to  do  something  unexpected,  wicked  quite  possibly, 
but  successful,  immense;  to  the  effect  that  telephone  girls 
should  stand  in  awe  of  him  and  private  secretaries  treat 
him  with  respect. 

' '  I  'm  sorry  you  should  have  to  wait, ' '  the  girl  said,  when 
she  came  to  the  end  of  the  letter  she  was  typing.  "Mr. 
"Williamson's  in  an  important  conference  but  I'm  positive 
he  thought  he'd  be  through  before  this." 

Henry  said  it  didn't  matter,  and  might  have  gone  on 
to  enlarge  upon  the  immateriality  of  the  delay  but  for 
the  sound  of  voices  that  began  coming,  now  the  type 
writer  was  stilled,  through  the  partition.  This  "con 
ference"  was  taking  place  in  the  secretary's  office  next 
door.  Words  weren't  distinguishable,  but  inflections 
and  intonations  were.  One  man  in  there  was  telling  a 
story  and  the  others  were  being  amused  by  it.  There 
was  a  sudden  laugh,  checked  because  the  narrator  went 
straight  on  and  overrode  it  in  a  voice  curiously  resonant. 

So  that  was  what  Henry  was  kept  waiting  for!  He 
could  see  the  picture  in  there,  he  was  confident,  as  easily 
as  if  that  mahogany  partition  had  been  glass  instead. 
John,  smoking  a  cigar,  of  course,  sitting  on  the  table 
clasping  one  stout  knee  in  both  hands,  swinging  the  other 


leg.  Young  Roland  Mill,  John's  secretary,  tilted  back 
in  his  swivel  chair,  blowing  smoke  rings  at  the  ceiling. 
And  somebody — anybody  of  the  sort  who  could  walk  past 
telephone  girls  and  office  boys  as  if  they  didn't  exist, 
and  open  doors  without  knocking — held  the  stage  tell 
ing  them  a  "good  one"  he.  had  picked  up  in  New  York 
last  week. 

Henry  took  his  hat  in  both  hands  and  sat  a  little 
straighter  in  his  chair.  The  girl,  he  noticed,  had  the 
grace  to  blush  over  the  way  the  excuse  she'd  offered  for 
her  employer  had  been  betrayed.  But  the  next  instant 
she  snatched  her  handkerchief,  pressed  it  to  her  face  and 
turned  away.  To  suppress  a  sneeze?  Or  a  laugh — at 
him?  Probably  he  did  look  ridiculous,  sitting  there  glar 
ing.  He  was  trembling.  He  must  make  up  his  mind 
what  to  do.  Should  he  ask  her  sharply  and  authoritatively 
to  telephone  in  to  John  the  information  that  he  was  wait 
ing?  Or  should  he  give  him  another  five  minutes? 

But  five  minutes  weren't  needed.  Almost  at  once,  the 
door  into  Mill's  office  was  briskly  opened.  Henry  heard 
young  Mill,  evidently  at  the  other  door,  say,  ''You  can 
get  out  this  way,  Mr.  Greer." 

The  man  addressed  stood  there  in  an  attitude  of  ar 
rested  motion,  grinning  back  into  the  room.  And  Henry, 
while  he  stared  at  the  sight  of  him,  held  his  breath.  All 
his  fidgety  annoyances  were  forgotten,  swallowed  up  in 
the  sensation  which  the  man's  appearance  produced. 

His  beard  was  the  first  thing  you  saw.  It  was  cut 
round  and  short — not  fashioned  at  all — and  it  was  black, 
as  black  as  if  it  had  been  drawn  upon  his  face  with  India 
ink.  His  hair  was  just  as  black  and  thick,  and  it  was 
cut  not  quite  short  enough  to  hide  a  tendency  to  curl. 
Against  this  blackness  of  jowl  and  brow,  the  gleam  of  his 
teeth  and  the  whites  of  his  eyes  made  a  dazzling  contrast. 
But  indeed,  as  you  took  him  in,  you  saw  that  he  was  a 
bundle  of  contrasts.  The  lightness  of  his  poise  as  he 
stood  there  holding  the  door,  against  the  burly  breadth 
of  those  shoulders  and  the  bull  neck;  the  look  of  gen- 


6  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

iality  that  you  got  from  his  smile  contradicted  by  his  nose 
which  jutted  out  in  so  bluntly  aggressive  a  manner  as  to 
be — piratical  almost,  Henry  felt. 

He  had  answered  Rollie  Mill  by  saying  in  his  peculiarly 
resonant  voice  that  he  always  thought  he  was  lucky,  com 
ing  to  a  place  like  this,  if  he  could  get  out  the  same  door 
he'd  come  in  by;  and  he  continued  for  a  minute  rubbing 
this  in.  All  these  robber  barons  of  finance  had,  he  sup 
posed,  a  chute  down  which  the  unwary  visitor,  having 
been  shorn,  was  permitted  to  plunge. 

Young  Mill  came  smiling  into  the  outer  office  at  this, 
nodded  politely  to  Henry,  saying  aside  to  him,  "Mr.  Will 
iamson's  just  getting  on  his  coat;  he'll  be  right  out," 
before  he  answered,  more  or  less  in  kind,  the  departing 
guest.  Henry  thought  he  hesitated  just  momentarily 
whether  to  perform  an  introduction  between  the  two 
and  then  decided  against  it. 

"When  he  came  back  from  the  corridor  door  whither  he 
had  ceremoniously  accompanied  the  pirate,  the  secretary 
let  out  a  long  breath. 

"Well,  if  any  one  wants  to  know  what  /  think,"  he 
began — only  it  wasn't  a  beginning,  for  he  said  no  more; 
lapsed  into  a  gloomy  secretarial  silence  instead,  and  with 
drew  to  his  own  office.  Of  course,  it  was  obvious  enough 
what  Rollie  would  think  of  a  cheeky  outsider  who  had  the 
effrontery  to  look  like  that  and  to  make  vulgar  jokes  at 
his  chief's  expense. 

John  looked  absent-minded  when  he  appeared  a  moment 
later.  He  said,  "Hello,  Henry.  All  ready?"  just  as  if  it 
had  been  Henry  who  had  caused  the  delay.  "I  guess 
we'll  run  along  then." 

He  said  nothing  more  all  the  way  down  in  the  elevator 
and  up  the  street.  From  the  turning  he  took  at  the  corner, 
Henry  guessed  that  they  were  going  to  the  Union  League 
Club  for  lunch.  The  oppression  of  the  silence  became 
unbearable  at  last  and  he  broke  it. 

"How's  Violet  these  days?"  he  asked.  "It  must  be,  I 
should  say,  two  months  since  I've  seen  her." 


THE  PAWN  7 

"She's  been  east,"  said  John.  "Got  home  last  week. 
Brought  Dorothy  with  her  from  school.  Easter  vaca 
tion." 

"Oh,  I  hope  I  may  see  Dorothy,"  Henry  said  brightly. 
"That's  a  lovely  age — seventeen." 

"It's  a  devil  of  an  age,"  said  John.  "Dorothy's  all 
right,  though,  I  guess." 

Then,  coming  out  of  his  abstraction  just  as  they  were 
turning  into  the  club,  he  took  Henry  by  the  arm. 

' '  Did  you  know  that  fellow  ? "  he  asked.  ' '  The  man  who 
was  up  in  my  office?" 

' '  No, ' '  Henry  said.  ' '  I  don 't  believe  I  've  ever  seen  him 
before.  I'm  sure  he's  not  one  of  the  customers  over  at  the 
bank." 

"His  name's  Greer,"  said  John.  "Joseph  Greer.  Have 
you  ever  heard  of  him?" 

"The  name's  vaguely  familiar,  perhaps,  but  I  can't 
place  it.  I  '11  be  glad  to  look  him  up  for  you,  if  you  like. ' ' 

"We've  looked  him  up,"  said  John.  "I  guess  we  know 
pretty  much  all  there  is  to  know  about  him.  He's  got  a 
proposition  we're  going  to  take  up.  Going  into  business 
with  him.  I'll  tell  you  the  whole  thing  at  lunch.  That's 
what  I  wanted  to  talk  to  you  about." 

They'd  got  rid  of  their  coats  by  this  time,  and  had  gone 
into  the  lavatory  to  wash  up.  Henry  took  off  his  eye 
glasses,  laid  them  on  the  little  shelf  above  the  bowl  and 
pressed  his  palms  against  his  eyes — a  natural-looking 
gesture  enough,  he  hoped.  The  sudden  ending  of  the  sus 
pense  of  the  last  two  hours  had  turned  him  giddy.  His 
job  was  safe,  after  all. 

He  steadied  himself  as  they  went  up  to  lunch  with  a 
spurt  of  indignation.  If  the  courteous  way  of  doing 
things  had  been  John's  way,  that  two  hours  of  misery 
need  never  have  been  suffered.  John  could  have  said,  with 
the  loss  of  no  more  than  one  of  his  precious  minutes, 
that  it  was  to  talk  over  a  new  business  enterprise  involving 
a  man  named  Greer  that  he  wanted  Henry  to  lunch.  It 
was  in  just  such  failures  of  real  consideration  that  the 


8  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

lack  of  true  breeding  showed  itself.     Just  what  one  might 
expect  from  the  son  of  old  Nick  "Williamson. 

Henry  checked  himself  here  with  the  reflection  that 
this  was  how  his  sister,  Margaret,  would  look  at  it.  And 
then,  a  little  startled,  he  sprang  to  Margaret's  defense. 

Poor  Margaret!  The  ill-usage  of  fortune  was  a  harder 
thing  for  a  woman  to  bear  than  it  could  possibly  be  for  a 
man.  It  was  natural  for  a  girl  to  cling  to  anything  that 
gave  her  support,  even  as  unreal  a  thing  as  a  fancied 
social  superiority  long  since  forgotten  by  their  world. 

Margaret  had  been  sixteen,  Henry  two  years  older  or 
so,  when  their  beautiful  cousin,  Violet  Prince,  married, 
and  it  was  easy  to  remember  that  her  selection  of  John 
Williamson  had  been  regarded  by  the  charitable  members 
of  the  family  as  distinctly  broad-minded  and  by  the  carp 
ers  as  downright  mercenary. 

John  had  been  all  right,  of  course,  even  in  those  days. 
Nicholas  Williamson's  only  son  couldn't  lightly  have  been 
left  out  of  account  by  anybody.  But  old  Nick  himself,  in 
a  community  just  waking  to  the  gracious  superfluities  of 
civilization,  had  been  a  hard  lump  to  digest.  It  was  not 
only  that,  to  the  last  day  of  his  life,  he  had  ostentatiously 
chewed  tobacco,  drunk  unconscionable  quantities  of  corn 
whisky  and  delighted  in  ribald  stories, — he  was  never 
done  taunting  his  tamer  contemporaries  with  their  decline 
from  these  virile  ways.  It  was  his  opinion  that  those  of 
them  who  sent  their  sons  to  eastern  schools  and  colleges 
and  gallivanting  about  Europe  afterward  were  making  of 
their  offspring  a  lot  of  cane-sucking  damn  fools.  His  boy, 
John,  had  gone  from  the  West  Division  High  School 
straight  to  La  Salle  Street. 

Old  Nick's  appearance  at  his  son's  wedding  was  one  of 
Henry's  imperishable  memories.  Visibly  exultant  he  was 
over  his  boy's  success  in  running  in  and  cutting  out  this 
prize  from  its  surrounding  convoy  of  cane-suckers.  He 
had  gloated  over  Violet  like  an  ogre. 

Violet's  marriage  would  have  been  a  melancholy  oc 
casion  for  Henry  in  the  best  of  circumstances.  She  was 


THE  PAWN  9 

twenty  at  the  time,  pretty  as  a  peach  of  course,  and  he, 
eighteen,  addicted  to  sonnets,  tender  as  a  head  of  lettuce, 
was  her  first  cousin,  privileged  and,  by  that  same  token, 
barred.  He  was  one  of  the  ushers,  and  he  had  blossomed 
out,  darkly,  for  the  occasion  in  the  double-breasted  frock 
coat  of  the  period,  tight-waisted,  full  in  the  skirt  and  in 
credibly  long.  Old  Nick  had  leered  at  him  and  later,  in 
his  hearing,  though  not  intentionally  perhaps,  had  re 
ferred  to  him,  with  a  guffaw,  as  "that  young  undertaker's 
apprentice."  Violet  had  heard  it,  too.  Henry  still  red 
dened  when  he  rememberd  that. 

It  was  a  satisfaction  to  think  how  short-lived  had 
been  old  Nick's  glee.  The  ogre  was  no  match  for  a  witch 
like  Violet,  and  she  promptly  took  his  son  away  from  him. 
She  moved  her  husband  bodily  from  his  father's  house — 
a  red  sandstone  monstrosity  on  Ashland  Avenue.  The 
young  couple  never  slept  a  night  there  until  they  were 
firmly  established  in  a  house  of  their  own  on  the  North 
Side.  She  taught  John  to  dress  for  dinner  even  when  they 
had  no  guests.  She  took  him  to  the  opera.  She  even 
led  him  so  far  astray  as  Palm  Beach  in  the  winter,  when 
serious-minded  men  stuck  to  their  desks.  And  she  spent 
his  money  (there  was  a  wicked  lot  of  it,  of  course,  and 
Violet's  people,  the  Princes,  had  never  been  much  more 
than  comfortably  well-to-do)  like,  the  old  man  used  to  say, 
straw  blowing  out  of  a  thrasher.  So  doing,  she  quenched 
Henry's  young  romance.  There  must  be  a  streak  in  her, 
he  feared,  of  a  rather  hard  frivolity. 

But  if  she,  with  the  years,  had  come  down  in  his  regard, 
John  had  risen.  There  was  real  kindliness  in  John.  And 
though  his  humor  tended  to  be  boisterous  and  his  manner 
was  never  precisely  gentle,  still  it  was  hard  to  see  anything 
more  than  that  in  him  of  the  savage  old  satyr  his  father 
had  been.  John  was  shrewd ;  mostly,  it  must  be  admitted, 
on  the  make.  He  could  treat  nothing  with  whole-hearted 
respect  that  wasn't  successful,  and,  being  successful,  he 
profoundly  respected  himself.  He  had  increased  two 
fold,  Henry  guessed,  the  fortune  he'd  inherited  from  his 


10  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

father,  Violet's  extravagances  notwithstanding.  And  it 
was  easy  to  read  in  him  a  comfortable  sort  of  contempt 
for  some  of  his  contemporaries  whose  stewardships  hadn't 
similarly  prospered.  Nevertheless,  when  disaster  had 
fallen  upon  the  Craven  family,  none  had  been  .kinder  or 
more  helpful  than  this  cousin-by-marriage  who  needn't 
have  bothered  about  them  at  all. 


""Why,  this  man  Greer,"  John  said,  after  he'd  eaten 
silently  and  methodically  through  the  lunch  he'd  ordered 
and  lighted  a  cigar,  "is  a  mechanical  engineer.  Machine 
designer.  One  of  the  best  in  the  business,  Gregory  Cor- 
bett  says.  Industrial  engineer.  Inventor.  A  whole  lot 
of  things.  He's  knocked  about  the  world  a  lot,  more  than 
any  man  I  know,  I  guess,  especially  South  America.  Trop 
ical  South  America.  He  lived  five  years,  according  to 
him,  on  the  upper  tributaries  of  the  Amazon, — River  of 
Doubt  and  so  on,  long  before  Roosevelt  came  there.  He 
went  naked,  he  says,  and  the  Indians  thought  he  was 
some  sort  of  god  because  he  had  so  much  hair  on  him  and 
could  do  better  tricks  than  their  own  medicine  men.  He 's 
something  of  a  liar,  I  guess,  but  even  so  he  must  have  seen 
a  lot  of  queer  things." 

Henry  didn't  doubt  that.  "And  I  should  say,"  he 
added,  "from  the  glimpse  I  had  of  him  in  your  office, 
that  he  was  still  capable  of  going  out  looking  for  more." 

' '  He 's  a  queer  cuss,  and  no  mistake, ' '  John  agreed.  ' '  But 
I  don't  think  he's  likely  to  go  back  to  the  jungle.  He  likes 
civilization  too  well.  That's  his  weakness,  they  say,  now. 
Drink  and  women.  From  all  I  can  hear,  he  hits  a  pretty 
swift  pace.  That's  one  of  the  things  that's  held  us  back 
from  going  in  with  him.  But  he's  prospered.  Really 
made  quite  a  lot  of  money  during  the  war.  He  was  mak 
ing  aeroplane  propellers  and  some  aeroplane  machinery 
— gears  and  so  on — out  of  compressed  fibers.  That  Air 
Board  was  just  his  meat  and  he  got  into  them  deep. 
Signed  up  a  big  contract  just  before  the  Armistice  that 


THE  PAWN  11 

he  made  them  pay  him  half  a  million  dollars  to  cancel. 
He's  not  lying  about  that,  anyhow.  We  know  all  about 
it." 

Still  there  was  an  air  of  skepticism  about  John, — the 
suggestion  that  he  hadn't  yet  managed  to  lay  his  finger 
upon  the  thing  that  Greer  was  lying  about.  Henry  must 
try  to  help.  That's  what  he  was  there  for,  he  supposed. 

''If  the  man's  got  as  much  money  as  that,"  he  ven 
tured,  "and  really  believes  that  his  idea  is  valuable,  why 
'does  he  ask  you  to  go  in  with  him?  I  take  it  that's  what 
he's  done." 

"Oh,"  John  grunted,  "that's  the  soundest  thing  about 
him.  Shows  he's  got  good  sense.  It  shows  he  isn't  one 
of  these  wild-eyed  people  who 're  always  trying  to  swing 
a  big  proposition  on  a  shoe-string.  That's  where  a  lot  of 
visionaries  get  their  grudge  against  bankers  and  so  on. 
They  start  something  they  can't  finish  and  they  don't 
begin  to  holler  for  help  until  they're  going  down  for  the 
third  time.  And  then  they're  sore,  when  their  scheme  is 
saved, — that  is,  if  it  proves  to  be  worth  saving — to  find 
that  it  belongs  mostly  to  somebody  else.  Greer  is  wise 
enough  to  allow  for  mistakes,  delays,  education — all  those 
things.  No,  he's  all  right,  as  far  as  that  goes." 

"What's  his  record?"  Henry  asked.  "What  has  he  done 
besides  run  around  naked  on  the  banks  of  the  Amazon?" 

He  was  rather  pleased  with  this  humorous  touch,  and 
expected  to  win  a  smile  from  John  with  it.  But  John, 
though  he  boasted  about  his  sense  of  humor, — there  were 
two  or  three  newspapers  he  bought  simply  because  they 
contained  comic  strips  which  were  favorites  of  his,  and  he 
enjoyed  the  sort  of  musical  comedies  they  put  on  at  the 
Globe  Theater — didn't,  as  a  rule,  make  nor  recognize  jokes 
when  they  occurred  in  a  serious  conversation,  that  is  to 
say,  in  a  business  conversation. 

He  explained  to  Henry  that  Greer 's  Amazonian  adven 
ture  belonged  to  the  period  of  his  youth.  Since  then,  he 
seemed  to  have  run  straight  enough.  Evidently  had  an 
enormous  capacity  for  hard  work,  which  John  found  it 


12  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

hard  to  reconcile  with  the  stories  of  dissipation  which 
formed  a  sort  of  nebulous  fringe  around  him.  He'd  been 
employed,  as  a  young  man,  by  various  big  engineering 
firms  in  Chicago,  along  in  the  latter  'nineties  and  early 
nineteen-hundreds.  Then,  for  some  reason  or  other,  not 
discreditable  so  far  as  John  knew,  he  'd  gone  back  to  South 
America.  Not,  however,  to  the  jungle.  He'd  lived  six 
or  eight  years  in  Peru  or  Chile,  perhaps  in  both  countries, 
getting  on  apparently  very  well  in  his  profession.  He 
spoke  Spanish  like  a  native,  it  was  said.  And  this  was 
probably  where  he  picked  up  his  odd  way  of  making  ges 
tures  when  he  talked.  His  beard,  too,  another  feature 
which  made  him  seem  queer,  had  been  honestly  come  by, 
you  might  say,  in  the  same  environment. 

Well,  he'd  come  back  to  Chicago  in  nineteen  ten,  or 
thereabout,  with  capital  enough  to  launch  himself  in 
dependently  as  a  consulting  engineer.  And,  from  then 
on,  they  had  a  perfectly  straight  line  on  him. 

There  was  no  doubt  at  all  that  his  work  was  first  rate. 
Corbett  and  Company  had  retained  him  after  their  big  fire 
in  nineteen  twelve,  and  had  been  important  clients  of 
his  off  and  on  ever  since.  Gregory  thought  he'd  saved 
them  a  lot  of  money.  He'd  made  some  revolutionary 
changes  in  their  method  of  routing  material  and  products 
through  the  plant.  He'd  done  the  sort  of  thing  for  them 
that  people  heard  such  a  lot  about  in  connection  with 
Ford's  works  at  Detroit.  Also,  he'd  redesigned  a  lot  of 
their  machinery. 

So,  once  more,  as  far  as  that  went,  he  was  all  right.  If 
he  told  you  a  mechanical  process  could  be  carried  out  in 
a  certain  way,  you  were  safe,  no  doubt,  in  assuming  that 
it  could. 

"And,  anyhow/'  John  concluded,  after  a  little  pause, 
"that's  the  side  of  him  we're  going  to  do  business  with. 
Generally  speaking,  it  won't  matter  to  us  when  he  goes 
to  bed  at  night  or  who  with,  or  how  much  champagne 
they've  had  to  drink." 

He  lapsed  into  an  abstracted  silence,  and  Henry,  this 


THE  PAWN  13 

time,  didn't  try  to  break  it.  He  felt  that  he'd  achieved 
at  least  a  pretty  good  understanding  of  John 's  perplexities. 
This  tough-sinewed  adventurer,  barbaric,  genially  pre 
dacious,  was  almost  as  alien  to  John  and  his  well-fed, 
sober,  respectable  friends — such  as  Frank  Crawford  and 
Gregory  Corbett — as  if  he  belonged  to  another  species 
altogether.  They  faced  him  uneasily — with  lowered 
heads.  It  was  an  instinctive  mistrust,  like  that  of  the 
domestic  animal  for  the  wild  beast  that  prowls  about  its 
stable. 

The  idea  amused  Henry.  He  thought  he'd  tell  Mar 
garet  about  it,  even  though  she  would  be  scandalized. 
His  amusement  deepened  as  it  occurred  to  him  how  re 
cent  was  the  domestication  of  these  stall-fed  people,  John 
and  Frank  and  Gregory.  To  their  fathers — grandfathers, 
at  most — a  man  like  Greer  wouldn't  have  seemed  strange. 
Not  to  old  Nick  Williamson  who  had  buccaneered  his  way 
to  fortune  in  the  wheat  market;  nor  to  Myron  Crawford 
who'd  made  millions  as  a  banker  in  the  wild-cat  days  out 
here  in  Illinois,  when  anything  could  be  a  bank  and  every 
bank  was  printing,  ad  lib.,  its  own  money;  nor  to  Gregory 
Corbett — this  Corbett 's  grandfather — who  had  got  his 
canny  start  building  wagons  for  the  gold  hunters  of 
'forty-nine  and  the  early  'fifties  to  cross  the  plains  in. 
They  were  a  hard-living,  hard-drinking,  as  well  as  a  hard 
working,  lot  who  would  have  taken  this  stranger  in, — 
most  likely  in  both  senses  of  the  phrase. 

John's  abstraction  seemed  to  have  come  into  focus  at 
last  upon  his  table  napkin.  He  was  feeling  it  between  a 
moistened  finger  and  thumb, — studying  its  threads. 

"I'm  one  of  the  directors  of  this  club,"  he  remarked, 
"and  I  happen  to  know  what  we  paid  for  this  last  lot  of 
linen  we  had  to  buy.  It  was  a  frightful  price." 

Henry  nodded  agreement.  "I  know.  Margaret  bought 
me  some  handkerchiefs  the  other  day.  And  they  say  it's 
going  to  get  worse  rather  than  better.  I  suppose  this 
Sinn  Fein  rumpus  in  Ireland  is  what 's  doing  it. ' ' 

"Linen  doesn't  come  from  Ireland,"  said  John.     "At 


14  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

least,  the  flax  isn't  grown  there.  Hardly  any,  only  a  few 
thousand  tons.  The  world's  commercial  flax  supply 
comes  from  Russia.  "We  can  pretty  well  count  on  it  that 
the  linen  famine  will  last  for  years." 

"Count  on  it?"  Henry  repeated.  Then,  perceiving 
that  this  wasn't  after  all  a  digression,  "Has  Greer  in 
vented  a  substitute  for  linen?"  he  asked. 

"Not  a  substitute,"  John  corrected.  "It's  the  real 
thing.  There's  an  average  of  two  million  acres  a  year 
sown  in  flax  right  here  in  this  country,  up  in  the  North 
west.  The  farmers  grow  it  for  seed — linseed  oil,  you  know. 
But  do  you  know  what  they  do  with  the  straw?  They 
burn  it,  close  to  two  million  tons  of  it  a  year,  right  in  the 
fields  where  it  grows." 

Henry  was  properly  amazed  at  this  statement,  and  the 
financier  went  on  to  explain. 

He  said  the  linen  industry  was  just  about  where  the 
cotton  industry  would  have  been  if  the  gin  had  never  been 
invented.  The  fibers  still  had  to  be  extracted  from 
the  straw  by  hand  labor, — peasant  labor,  old  people 
and  children,  who  wouldn't  have  to  be  paid  anything 
for  their  toil.  The  woody  gummy  stuff  in  the  straw 
had  to  be  rotted  away  from  the  linen  fibers.  Some 
times  they  did  it  by  tying  the  straw  into  bundles  and 
sinking  it  in  the  bottom  of  streams  or  ponds.  Sometimes 
by  spreading  it  out  on  the  grass  land  where  the  dew  and 
the  wind  and  the  sun  could  get  at  it.  Anyhow,  it  took  an 
everlasting  lot  of  work  and  watching,  and  weeks  of  time. 
When  it  got  rotted — retted,  the  technical  word  was — to 
the  proper  point,  they  beat  it  and  combed  it  by  hand. 

Nothing  like  that  would  do  for  America,  of  course. 
There  had  been  no  end  of  attempts  to  devise  a  modern 
labor-saving  process  that  would  do  the  work,  but  they'd 
all  failed.  Mechanical  processes  ruined  the  fibers  and 
the  chemical  processes  were  too  expensive,  besides  being 
tricky  and  difficult.  "Well,  Greer  had  got  on  to  another 
way  of  doing  it  and  it  worked. 

It    seemed     it     wasn't     the     river     water     nor     the 


THE  PAWN  15 

dew  that  rotted  the  woody  fibers  of  the  flax 
straw,  but  a  germ  of  some  sort — a  microbe.  That 
was  all  that  rotted  anything.  There  were  hundreds 
of  different  kinds  of  rot;  plants  they  were, — little  micro 
scopic  plants — and  some  of  them  went  after  one  thing 
and  some  after  another.  Greer  had  got  hold  of  the  special 
sort  of  bug  that  would  eat  the  wood  and  gum  in  the  flax 
straw  and  leave  the  linen  fiber  alone.  In  Europe,  the 
universal  practise  was  to  pull  the  flax  green,  before  it  had 
gone  to  seed.  One  of  the  great  advantages  of  Greer 's 
method  was  that  it  produced  practically  as  good  results 
from  the  ripe  straw,  which  gave  you  the  seed  crop  as  a 
by-product. 

"You  can't  patent  a  microbe,  can  you?"  Henry  asked. 

"No,"  John  admitted,  "but  you  can  patent  pretty 
near  everything  else, — method  of  inoculation,  storage, 
all  the  machinery  that  goes  into  the  process, — and  there's 
quite  a  bit  of  it.  No,  there'll  be  no  trouble  about  that. 
What  we'll  do,  eventually,  will  be  to  license  the  process 
and  rent  the  machinery  to  local  corporations.  But,  in 
order  to  get  the  thing  going,  we  shall  have  to  finance  and 
operate  several  of  those  local  companies  ourselves.  It's 
likely  to  spread  out  into  an  enormously  big  thing. 

"Take  the  matter  of  getting  raw  material,  for  instance. 
Eight  now,  you  could  get  it  for  nothing — or  next  to  noth 
ing.  It's  worthless  to  the  farmers.  They  burn  it.  But 
give  them  the  idea  that  it's  valuable,  and  they'll  try  to 
hold  ITS  up.  We  may  have  to  buy  the  seed  as  well  as 
the  straw;  finance  the  whole  crop.  That  wants  more 
thinking  out  than  we've  given  it  so  far.  And,  on  the 
other  hand,  there  is  the  question  of  marketing  the  raw 
linen  without  breaking  the  price.  The  longer  you  look 
at  it,  the  bigger  it  gets." 

Oh,  yes,  it  was  a  big  thing,  Henry  conceded  that,  and 
he  listened  attentively  enough  to  the  details  which  John 
now  went  on  to  talk  about.  So  many  shares  of  common, 
no  par  value ;  so  many  shares  of  seven  per  cent,  cumulative 
preferred,  convertible.  Just  the  regular  thing;  a  scheme 


16  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

of  organization  with  which  Henry's  experience  in  the 
bank  had  made  him  thoroughly  familiar. 

At  the  back  of  his  mind  as  he  listened,  was  the  medie 
valist's  faint,  unavailing  regret  at  the  fall  of  another 
stronghold.  The  picture,  so  revolting  to  John,  of  children 
and  old  people  spreading  the  bundles  of  straw  upon  the 
dew- wet  grass  for  the  sun  and  wind  to  work  upon;  the 
jolly  labor  of  beating  and  combing  it ;  the  pleasant  domes 
tic  hum  of  the  little  spinning-wheel  in  the  corner  of  the 
cottage  during  the  long  winter  evenings;  condemned,  ob 
literated,  by  Joe  Greer's  scientific  inoculations  and  the 
nasty  clank  of  his  machinery.  Then,  with  a  start,  he 
came  wide  awake.  What  was  it  John  had  said? 

"You're  the  man  we've  picked  for  treasurer." 

"I!"  he  exclaimed.  "Oh,  I  don't  think  I  could.  I— 
it  would — " 

He  was  trembling  again,  and  he  hastily  hid  his  hands 
beneath  the  table.  "It  would  involve  my  leaving  the 
bank,  I  suppose,  and  I  know  nothing  about  this  new  busi 
ness,  you  see, — manufacturing  and  so  on.  And  my — my 
work  at  the  bank  has  been  satisfactory,  hasn't  it?" 

He  had  to  support  for  a  moment  a  look  from  John's 
gray  eyes  as  keen  as  the  stroke  of  a  surgeon's  scalpel. 
Then,  mercifully,  it  was  withdrawn. 

"There  isn't  the  slightest  question,"  John  said,  "of 
your  value  to  the  bank.  But  the  bank's  value  to  you,  it 
strikes  me,  is  pretty  well  played  out.  There's  no  likely 
chance  of  any  promotion  from  the  place  you're  holding 
now,  for  years.  This  new  job  outside  is  a  promotion. 
We'll  pay  you  ten  thousand  a  year  to  begin  with.  That 
will  make  you  and  Margaret  a  lot  more  comfortable,  and  it 
will  increase  as  the  business  warrants  it.  I'll  carry  a 
block  of  preferred  stock  for  you.  You  can  pay  it  off  at 
your  convenience.  And  the  common  that  goes  with  it,  if 
the  thing  does  anything  like  what  we  think  it  will,  ought 
to  make  you  independent.  That  part  of  it's  a  gamble, 
of  course,  but  it  looks  good  to  us.  As  for  your  being 
competent  to  fill  the  job,  we  all  agreed  upon  that  at  once. 


THE  PAWN  17 

You've  got  a  thorough  knowledge  of  accounts  and  credit. 
And  that's  all  you  need,  except  loyalty,  which,  of  course, 
we've  got  absolute  confidence  in. 

"You  see  how  we  stand?  "We  believe  in  Greer's  pro 
cess.  We  believe  in  his  technical  ability.  But  we  aren't 
sure  of  the  man  himself.  He 's  to  be  president  of  the  com 
pany  and  he  must  be  given,  of  course,  a  good  deal  of  rope. 
We  can't  spend  all  our  time  holding  directors'  meetings 
on  him,  and  it  would  hamper  him  unfairly  if  we  did.  Yet 
he's  never  had  other  people's  money  in  large  amounts  to 
play  with  before,  and  we  don't  know  how  it  will  affect 
him.  He  may  get  Napoleonic  ideas.  He  may  be  slightly, 
crooked.  He  may  have  a  fool  notion  that  he  can  do  us 
up.  I  'm  not  a  bit  sure  that  he  hasn  't.  Well,  as  treasurer, 
you  11  be  able  to  see  what's  going  on.  Keep  us  posted. 
You'll  be  our  only  representative  there,  day  in,  day  out. 
He's  got  somebody — I  don't  know  who — that  he  means  to 
make  secretary.  And  the  whole  staff  will  be  his.  You'll 
be  our  watch-dog.  Of  course,  you  won't  bark  at  him  all 
the  time.  It  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  keep  him  rubbed 
the  wrong  way.  There's  where  a  sociable  kind  of  fellow 
like  you  will  be  especially  valuable." 

There  was  a  little  silence. 

"Oh,  there's  no  doubt  in  our  minds,"  John  concluded, 
"that  you're  the  man  for  the  job.  You'll  want  a  little 
time  to  think  it  over,  I  know.  The  meeting  isn't  until 
to-morrow,  at  three  o'clock.  Sleep  on  it  to-night  and  call 
me  up  the  first  thing  in  the  morning  to  let  me  know  what 
you've  decided." 

3 

The  catastrophe  which  years  ago  had  changed  the  di 
rection  and  the  prospect  of  Henry  Craven's  life  was  a 
commonplace  tragedy  enough,  the  sudden  death  of  his 
father  at  only  three  or  four  years  past  fifty  and  the  en 
suing  discovery  by  the  widow  and  the  two  just  grown 
children  that  there  was  nothing,  or  but  very  little  more 
than  nothing,  for  them  to  go  on  living  upon. 


18  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Chauncey  Craven  had  been  a  golden  youth.  There  are 
plenty  of  old  women  to-day  who  still  like  to  get  talking 
about  him — about  what  a  voice  he  had,  what  looks,  what 
a  Avay  with  him.  He  made  a  fortune  before  he  was  thirty 
by  a  coup  de  main  on  the  Board  of  Trade — wheat  it  must 
have  been — and  then  dramatically  abjured  speculation 
altogether  and  settled  down  to  the  business  of  brokerage. 
But  he  never  was  very  assiduous  at  it. 

He  was  always,  Henry  remembered,  mildly  deriding 
his  friends  for  taking  their  affairs  too  seriously.  It  was 
easy  to  be  rich  enough  for  all  reasonable  purposes.  He'd 
proved  that.  Why  should  one  submit  to  a  grinding  tyr 
anny  just  to  make  one's  self  richer?  The  family  had 
spent  a  good  deal  of  time  abroad,  primarily  in  the  interest 
of  Mrs.  Craven's  health  and  seriously  to  the  prejudice  of 
the  children's  formal  education.  Chauncey  was  genuinely 
devoted  to  the  querulous  semi-invalid  his  wife  had  be 
come,  and  was  very  affectionate  and  indulgent  with  the 
children.  Henry  couldn't  remember  that  he  had  ever  been 
denied  anything  he  seriously  wanted. 

The  boy's  most  pronounced  appetite  and  aptitude  was 
for  music,  and  this  Chauncey  gratified  lavishly.  He 
even  offered  no  objection  to  Henry's  wish  to  forego  col 
lege,  which  he  wasn't  at  all  properly  prepared  for,  when 
the  time  came,  and  go  on  with  his  music  instead.  And, 
though  there  was  no  thought  of  his  making  a  profession  of 
it,  Henry  was  still,  in  a  desultory  way,  studying  violin 
and  composition  when  his  father  died. 

What  they  found  when  they  looked  into  Chauncey 's  af 
fairs,  though  it  horrified  and  astonished  every  one,  was, 
after  all,  just  about  what  might  have  been  expected.  The 
business — a  half-hearted  enterprise  at  best — had  been 
losing  money.  His  family  was  becoming  more  expensive 
from  year  to  year  as  the  children  grew  up  and  his  wife's 
cures  were  farther  fetched, — the  easy  and  obvious  ones 
having  been  long  exhausted.  So,  secretly  operating 
through  another  brokerage  house,  he  had  tried  to  repeat 
that  brilliant  raid  of  twenty  years  ago,  and  failed. 


THE  PAWN  19 

This  happened  three  or  four  years  before  he  died,  but  he 
revealed  it  to  no  one.  He  couldn't  bear,  Henry  supposed, 
to  dissipate  the  golden  aura  of  effortless  success  which 
had  enveloped  him  from  youth.  So  he  went  on  as  if 
nothing  had  happened.  There  was  no  shorten 
ing  of  sail,  no  coming  about  upon  a  new  tack. 
They  had  gone  on  living,  of  course,  upon  his  depleted 
capital.  He  may  have  contemplated  a  third  plunge  in 
the  wheat  pit  and  have  been  waiting  for  a  likely  looking 
opportunity.  He  may  have  argued  with  himself  that,  by 
keeping  up  appearances,  he  was  preserving  his  credit 
against  this  possible  event.  Or  he  may  have  been  waiting 
for  nothing  at  all,  unless  perhaps  a  miracle.  Henry  ached 
with  pity  whenever  he  thought  of  the  hell  his  father  must 
have  lived  in  during  those  last  years.  Yet  he  had  be 
trayed  nothing,  made  no  confidences. 

Henry  never  really  knew  just  how  complete  the  smash 
had  been.  John  Williamson  had  taken  hold  and  recovered 
what  salvage  there  was  from  the  wreck.  He  sold  the 
big  house  which  Chauncey  had  built  in  the  exuberance  of 
that  famous  wheat  corner  (it  was  mortgaged  to  the  eaves, 
of  course)  advantageously  enough  to  wring  a  small  equity 
out  of  it.  Finally,  with  what  the  estate  boiled  down  to, 
he  bought  standard  securities.  Henry  had  always  sus 
pected  some  benignant  hocus  pocus  on  John's  part  about 
this,  but  he  took  pains  not  to  mention  it.  Whether  that 
little  fund  was  something  they  were  rightfully  entitled  to 
or  not  they  needed  it;  couldn't  get  on  without  it.  The  in 
come  wasn't  sufficient  as  it  was,  with  an  invalid  mother 
on  their  hands,  not  though  they  moved  into  a  modest 
flat  (in  a  good  neighborhood,  of  course) ;  not  though 
Margaret  came  home  from  her  boarding-school  to  be  con 
stituted  sole  nurse,  and  Henry  took  the  place  John's  in 
terest  made  for  him  in  the  bank.  One  by  one,  those 
thousand-dollar  bonds  had  been  sold — secretly,  so  that 
mother  shouldn't  suspect — in  the  interest  of  one  promis 
ing  method  of  treatment  after  another.  She  outlasted 
them  all — she  didn't  die  until  the  summer  of  nineteen 


20          JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

eighteen — but,  by  that  time,  Henry  was  earning  enough 
to  carry  them  along. 

They'd  been  pretty  hard  years,  those  fifteen — quarter  of 
a  lifetime  almost — between  his  father's  death  and  his 
mother's;  drudging,  discouraging  years.  And,  Henry  re 
flected,  harder  for  Margaret  than  for  him.  She  had  been, 
people  were  always  telling  him — as  if  he  didn't  know — a 
perfect  brick  about  it.  Faithful  and  tireless  in  her  moth 
er's  service,  endlessly  self-sacrificing,  so  much,  perhaps,  one 
might  take  for  granted.  Margaret  had  done  better  than 
that.  She'd  kept  herself  from  going  slack.  She'd  man 
aged,  somehow,  to  dress  well  in  circumstances  and  on  an 
income  that  would  have  reduced  a  domitable  spirit  to 
acquiescence  in  frowsy  hair  and  a  soiled  kimono.  She'd 
gone  out  to  dinner  parties  when  her  bones  must  have  ached 
for  bed  and  when  there  were  hours  of  drudging  domestic 
toil  waiting  for  her  when  she  should  come  home.  She'd 
carried  Henry  along  with  her,  driven  him,  spurred  him, 
made  him  keep  up  his  interest  in  music — even  practise 
on  his  violin.  And  this  pride  and  resolution  of  hers  had 
won  a  sort  of  victory.  Shaken  in  the  sieve  of  calamity 
all  these  years,  the  brother  and  sister  had  never  fallen 
through  the  meshes.  They  had  hung  on,  thanks  to 
Margaret,  in  the  social  stratum  they  had  been  born 
into. 

Whether  or  not  the  victory  was  going,  finally,  to  be 
worth  what  it  cost  was  a  question  Henry  had  never  been 
able  to  decide.  They  could  have  cut  loose  from  many  of 
their  worries  and  been  materially  more  comfortable  at 
the  same  time  by  letting  themselves  simply  drop  out  of 
sight,  into  a  world  where  there  were  no  pretenses  to  keep 
up. 

To  the  eyes  of  their  friends,  there  were  upon  Margaret 
no  visible  marks  of  the  struggle,  but  Henry  saw  her 
closer  to.  There  was  a  tightness  in  her  voice  when,  off 
guard,  she  failed  to  summon  the  masking  suavity,  and  a 
dry  brightness  in  her  eyes.  Since  their  mother's  death 
(a  release,  of  course;  there  was  no  possibility  of  a  contrary 


THE  PAWN  21 

pretense),  the  signs  of  the  strain  had  been  plainer  than 
ever.  She  needed  a  change — even  Violet  had  come  to 
see  that.  But  she  passionately  refused  to  go  away. 
Henry's  assurances  that  he  could  get  on  perfectly  by  him 
self  for  a  few  weeks,  or  months,  missed  the  mark  alto 
gether.  All  she  wanted  was  to  be  let  alone,  not  fussed 
over;  above  all,  not  stared  at  as  if  there  was  something 
queer  about  her  looks. 

Henry  came  home  early  from  the  bank,  the  day  John 
offered  him  that  new  job,  and  was  relieved  when  he  let 
himself  into  the  apartment  to  find  that  Margaret  was  not 
at  home.  He  had,  he  supposed,  already  made  up  his 
mind  to  accept  John's  offer.  It  was  a  promotion,  of 
course,  which  implied  the  solidest  sort  of  compliment  from 
John's  associates  in  the  new  enterprise  as  well  as  from 
John  himself.  The  feeling  appropriate  to  the  offer  of  a 
chance  like  that  was  one  of  exuberant  happiness. 

Let  him  think  what  the  new  salary  (nearly  double  what 
he  was  getting  at  the  bank)  would  mean.  A  competent 
servant  here  in  the  flat  for  Margaret,  somebody  who 
could  cook  a  real  dinner;  less  contriving  over  her  clothes; 
the  taxi  not  merely  when  it  was  a  brutal  necessity,  but 
whenever  it  was  desirable;  Monday  night  seats — good 
seats  down-stairs — at  the  opera;  a  good  piano,  so  that 
when  Novelli  came  to  dinner  he  could  be  asked  to  play, 
or  Paula  Wollaston  might  be  tempted  to  sit  down  at  it  and 
sing.  None  of  that  was  a  dream,  though  it  would  seem 
like  one.  It  was  all  clearly  and  reasonably  predicable 
from  John's  promise.  The  dream  lay  beyond  that.  A 
gamble,  John  had  called  it,  but  unless  he  had  confidently 
and  reasonably  believed  that  it  would  come  true,  he 
wouldn't  be  putting  his  money  into  it.  Independence.  A 
restoration  of  the  life  which  the  unthinking  boy  he  'd  been 
had  taken  for  granted  as  his  natural  lot.  Security,  travel, 
leisure, — his  within  ten  years,  five  perhaps. 

Yet,  somehow,  he  could  feel  no  thrill  either  at  the  dream 
or  at  the  reality.  It  frightened  him;— most  of  all,  the 
smiling,  formidable  face  of  Joe  Greer  whom  he  was  ex- 


22  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

pected  to  watch.  Suppose  he  shouldn't  watch  him  suc 
cessfully.  Suppose,  from  his  inadequacy  to  the  task,  the 
enterprise  collapsed.  Or  suppose  it  collapsed  anyway. 
"Where  would  he  be  then?  If  it  weren't  for  Margaret, 
lie  believed  he  would  refuse.  The  bank  at  all  events 
was  safe,  and  he  was  safe  in  it.  He  knew  that  now.  John 
had  told  him  so,  for  the  first  time,  explicitly.  But  of 
course  Margaret  was  to  be  considered.  And  his  present 
salary  at  the  bank,  with  prices  going  up  the  way  they 
were,  was  getting  narrower  all  the  time. 

He  tossed  aside  the  evening  paper  he'd  been  holding  in 
his  hand  without  even  unfolding,  hoisted  himself  out  of 
the  easy  chair  he'd  dropped  into  and  wandered  restlessly 
about  the  room. 

He  must  decide  before  to-morrow  morning.  He  ought 
to  decide  now  before  Margaret  came  home.  She  would  be, 
he  uneasily  suspected,  upset  about  it,  and  more  so  if  he 
presented  it  to  her  as  an  open  question  than  as  a  closed 
one.  Well,  hadn't  he,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  already  de 
cided  ?  The  meeting  was  to-morrow  afternoon.  Wouldn  't 
it  embarrass  John  rather  seriously  if  he  were  to  call  up  in 
the  morning  and  say  he  wouldn't  take  it?  Had  John 
weighed  that  for  a  moment  as  a  possible  alternative?  Of 
course  not.  The  thing  had  been  settled  practically  from 
the  beginning  by  John  himself.  The  outcome,  then,  be 
came  one  of  John's  responsibilities. 

He  took  a  long  breath  of  relief.  He'd  fall  upon  Mar 
garet  when  she  came  in  and  tell  her  joyfully  the  good 
news.  He  wished  he'd  thought  to  stop  at  the  florist's  or 
the  confectioner's  and  buy  something  a  little  extravagant 
that  might  stand  as  a  token  of  it.  Perhaps  it  wasn't  yet 
too  late. 

No,  confound  it,  there  went  the  buzzer  now.  Probably 
Margaret  herself,  though  she  usually  had  a  key.  He 
pressed  the  button  to  release  the  catch  down-stairs  and 
opened  the  door  into  the  corridor. 


THE  PAWN  23 

4 

It  wasn't  Margaret,  though.  There  were  two  people 
coming  up,  and  they  proved  to  be  Violet  Williamson  and 
young  Dorothy.  The  latter,  when  she  saw  who  was  wait 
ing  for  them,  left  her  mother  behind,  took  the  remaining 
flight  of  stairs  two  at  a  time,  flung  her  arms  around  him. 
gave  him  a  tight  hug  and  kissed  him  soundly,  just  as  she'd 
used  to  do  when  she  was  unequivocally  a  little  girl.  It 
was  a  heart-warming  experience  and  made  Henry  wonder 
what  John  had  meant  by  saying  seventeen  was  a  devil  of 
an  age. 

Violet,  though,  coming  up  just  as  the  embrace  ended, 
slightly  raised  her  eyebrows  over  it,  Henry  thought.  He 
hoped  the  child  didn't  see. 

Violet  said:  "I  might  almost  kiss  you  myself.  It's 
such  ages  since  I've  seen  you."  But  she  didn't  do  it,  and 
went  on  to  say  that  she  hoped  Margaret  was  at  home. 

"She  isn't,"  Henry  acknowledged.  ''But  she'll  be 
turning  up  any  minute  now.  Come  in,  both  of  you,  any 
way.  You  two,"  he  went  on,  glancing  from  one  to  the 
other,  "look  more  like  sisters  all  the  time.  It's  almost 
impossible  to  believe  you're  anything  else." 

"Henry!"  Dorothy  cried  instantly.  "How  sweet  of 
you!" 

The  tone  with  its  artificial  over-emphasis,  adult,  worldly, 
ostentatiously  insincere,  startled  him  into  staring  at  her. 
The  jolly  child  who  had  flung  herself  upon  him  a  moment 
ago  had  been  somehow  suppressed. 

He  noted  details  now  that  he  hadn't  taken  in  before. 
The  eyebrows  narrowed  to  a  finely  penciled  line,  the 
sophisticated  slant  of  the  little  French  sailor  hat,  the  pose 
erect  and  rather  insolently  square,  the  hands  plunged 
deep  into  pockets.  There  was  still  in  his  nostrils  a  faint 
perfume  that  had  been  there,  unnoted  until  now,  since 
she  kissed  him;  some  sort  of  innocent  cosmetic,  no  doubt. 
His  eye  didn't  detect  it.  She  turned  away  under  his 
gaze,  easily  enough,  as  if  she  were  leaving  the  stage  to  het 
mother. 


24  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"I  suppose  that  remark  of  mine  must  have  sounded  like 
a  dreadful  bromide,"  he  said  to  Violet.  "I  was  betrayed 
into  it  because  it's  literally  true.  Let  me  take  your 
wraps  and  make  you  some  tea  so  that  Margaret  shan't 
miss  you." 

"I  suppose  we  might,"  Violet  said  dubiously.  "It's 
only,"  she  went  on,  apparently  realizing  that  this  hadn't 
sounded  very  gracious,  "that  I've  a  million  things  to  do. 
I  just  got  back  last  week  with  Dorothy,  and  I'm  spinning 
like  a  top." 

Henry  nodded.  "John  told  me.  I  had  lunch  with  him 
to-day." 

She  looked  up  at  him  with  unmistakable,  if  faint,  sur 
prise.  "What  are  you  and  John  conspiring  about?"  she 
asked. 

Henry  wasn't  at  all  sure  that  he  liked  Violet,  but  it 
was  true  that  he  had  never  quite  got  over  being  in  love 
with  her.  He  was  hypersensitive  to  her.  The  old  string 
had  vibrated  when  she'd  spoken  a  moment  earlier  of  the 
possibility  of  kissing  him.  He  wondered  whether  she'd 
meant  it  to.  It  wasn't  an  unreasonable  assumption.  She 
was  as  pretty,  he  thought,  as  she'd  been  twenty  years  ago. 
If  there  was  no  look  of  youth  about  her,  neither  was  there 
any  of  age.  She  looked  as  slender  as  the  girl;  her  skin 
as  smooth,  her  flesh  as  firm,  whatever  artful  processes 
might  have  been  employed  to  maintain  these  results.  "What 
she  lacked  she'd  always  lacked,  and  that  was  tenderness. 
This  was  what  he  had  felt  in  that  last  question  of  hers. 
There  mightn't  have  been  any  slighting  implication  in  her 
asking  what  he  and  John  were  conspiring  about,  but  he 
felt  himself  flushing  a  little  and  speaking  stiffly  when  he 
answered  her. 

"John  wants  me  to  be  treasurer  of  the  new  company 
they're  getting  up!" 

He  must,  he  supposed,  have  betrayed  this  feeling,  for 
she  brightened  instantly  and  cried:  "How  splendid!  I 
hope  you'll  make  him  pay  you  an  enormous  salary.  What 
company  is  it?  I  don't  believe  I  know." 


THE  PAWN  25 

"Why,  there's  a  man  named  Greer,"  he  began,  but  she, 
•with  a  stare  and  a  laugh,  interrupted  him. 

' '  Not  that  man ! ' '  she  cried.  ' '  Good  gracious ! — No, 
I  don't  know  a  thing  about  it,  really,  only  before  I  went 
east  there  was  quite  a  lot  of  talk  about  something  he 
wanted  John  to  go  into.  What's  the  new  company  going 
to  do?" 

It  wras  a  new  process  for  making  linen,  Henry  explained 
— a  little  lamely,  for  he  felt  he'd  blundered  somehow. 
Then  he  asked  to  be  excused  a  minute  while  he  went  out 
and  got  the  tea  started.  The  maid,  he  thought,  was  out. 

"I'm  coming  along  to  help,"  Dorothy  announced, 
taking  off  her  hat  and  chucking  it  into  the  window-seat 
as  she  said  it. 

Foraging  with  her  in  the  pantry  and  through  the  ice 
box  for  the  materials  they  needed,  he  found  his  first  im 
pression  of  the  girl  who'd  come  flying  up-stairs  to  hug 
him  reasserting  itself.  She  made  little  jokes  about  his 
ignorance  of  the  establishment,  exclaimed  with  whole 
hearted  delight  over  a  trove  of  "Lorna  Doones"  in  a 
paper  bag  in  the  bread-box,  and  consoled  him  when  an 
exhaustive  search  had  failed  to  produce  a  lemon. 

"It  doesn't  matter  about  us,"  she  said,  "because 
Violet  takes  milk  in  hers  and  I  hate  tea  whatever  they  put 
in  it." 

He  had  jumped  at  that  "Violet"  and  now,  looking 
around  at  her,  he  saw  that  she'd  blushed  over  it. 

"I  was  practising  on  you,"  she  admitted.  "She  wants 
me  to." 

"Your  mother?" 

The  girl  nodded.  "Alicia  Wodehouse  calls  her  mother 
by  her  first  name — we  spent  last  Sunday  with  them  down 
in  Philadelphia.  And  it  does  sound  rather  amusing  and 
— chic.  And  of  course  when  any  one  looks  as  young  as 
mother,  the  other  thing  is  ridiculous,  really." 

Henry  was  still  speechless  over  this  when  he  heard 
Margaret  talking  to  Violet  in  the  other  room.  He  was 
stabbed  by  a  prophetic  sense  that  he'd  committed  a  mis- 


26  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

demeanor  in  letting  loose  a  guest — even  a  child — in  this 
part  of  the  flat.  It  was  a  moment  later  that  his  sister, 
without  stopping  to  remove  her  wraps,  swooped  down 
upon  them  in  the  pantry.  She  kissed  Dorothy  enthusiasti 
cally  and  held  her  off  in  both  hands. 

"You're  a  delicious-looking  young  thing,"  she  said. 

"I  wish  I  looked  like  you,"  the  girl  retorted,  a  little 
flushed  but  easily  enough.  "I  always  have,  you  know." 

People  had  just  one  adjective  for  Margaret — good-look 
ing.  She  fell  short  of  beauty  and  there  was  nothing 
pretty  about  her.  She  had  regular  features,  rather  finely 
modeled,  a  good  skin  and  enough  hair.  Had  her  life 
run  on  in  the  channel  that  it  had  started  in,  she  might 
have  attained  an  effect  of  style,  smartness  anyhow.  As 
it  was,  what  she  had  achieved  was  a  crispness  of  movement 
and  inflection,  an  air  of  adequacy  to  any  situation  that 
might  arise,  which  men,  in  the  main,  found  a  little  for 
midable.  The  men  who  liked  her  best  were  older  than 
she  and  married.  But  just  this  quality,  it  was  easy  to 
guess,  was  what  young  Dorothy  admired.  And  you  could 
not  mistake  the  sincerity  of  what  she  had  just  said. 

Margaret 's  smile,  though,  had  a  quirk  in  it.  ' '  It 's  lucky 
for  you  there's  no  fairy  godmother  hanging  about,"  she 
remarked,  "to  snap  you  up  on  a  wish  like  that."  Then, 
abruptly,  she  shooed  them  out  into  the  sitting-room  to 
keep  Violet  amused  while  she  got  the  tea. 

Dorothy  went  at  once,  of  course,  but  Henry  hung  back. 
He  wanted,  in  two  sentences,  to  tell  Margaret  about  the 
new  job  before  Violet  should  force  his  hand,  but  she  mis 
read  his  intention.  "Go  along,"  she  said  curtly;  "you 
can't  help  me  here."  Still  he  hesitated  for  a  second,  but 
the  look  he  met  in  her  eyes  was  too  much  for  him  and  he 
gave  it  up.  He  didn't  quite  dare,  either,  ask  Violet  not 
to  mention  it.  She  mightn't  take  it  right.  Trust  to  luck 
was  all  he  could  do. 

And  luck  didn't  favor  him,  because,  just  as  Margaret 
was  coming  in  with  the  tray  (the  teapot  and  the  cups  upon 
it  were  not,  he  noted,  those  that  he  and  Dorothy  had  got 


27 

out,  and  she  had  found  a  lemon),  Violet  said,  "It  must 
seem  strange  to  be  leaving  the  bank,  doesn't  it?" 

He  answered  quickly,  "Margaret  doesn't  know."  Then 
to  his  sister  he  went  on,  "John  offered  me  a  new  job  at 
lunch  to-day  and  I — I'm  taking  it." 

Her  eyebrows  went  up  with  an  expression  which  be 
trayed  nothing  but  good-humored  surprise,  and  she  threw 
Violet,  in  parenthesis,  a  question  as  to  how  she  wanted 
her  tea  before  she  made  any  other  comment.  Then  she 
said,  "It  must  be  pretty  good  if  you  could  make  up  your 
mind  as  quickly  as  that  to  take  it." 

"Well,  I'm  sure  it  must  look  good  to  John,"  Violet  ob 
served.  "The  whole  scheme,  I  mean.  Because  unless  it 
had  looked — well — marvelous,  he'd  never  have  gone  in 
with  that  man." 

"Greer,  you  mean,"  Henry  said,  and  turned  once  more 
to  Margaret  with  explanations.  "He's  an  inventor  and 
he's  found  a  way  to  make  linen  out  of  American  flax 
straw.  They've  never  been  able  to  do  it  before  and  the 
farmers  have  burnt  it — thousands  or  maybe  millions,  of 
tons  of  it  every  year.  I  don't  understand  Greer 's  pro 
cess  in  the  least.  I'm  not  even  sure  that  John  does.  But 
he  seems  to  have  no  doubt  it  works.  John  wants  me  to 
be  treasurer  of  the  new  company,"  he  concluded.  "The 
inventor  himself  is  to  be  president." 
"Have  you  met  him  yet?"  Violet  asked. 
"I  just  got  a  glimpse  of  him,"  Henry  answered.  "I 
hadn't  time  to  see  anything  but  his  beard." 

"That's  the  man,  all  right,"  Violet  said,  with  a  nod. 
And  went  on,  since  they  were  both  visibly  waiting  for 
more,  "Why,  he  sounds  amusing  to  me;  really  attractive. 
Jimmie  Wallace  likes  him  quite  a  lot.  He  likes  to  play 
with  theatrical  people, — that's  how  Jimmie  knows  him. 
But,  of  course,  Jimmie  himself  isn't  exactly  what  you'd 
call — austere.  He's  got  an  apartment — Greer,  I  mean — 
up  on  Sheridan  Road,  in  the  same  building  that  Bella  and 
Bill  Forrester  are  in.  Bella  is  quite  an  authority  on  him. 
Never  met  him,  of  course.  But  she  meets  up  with  him,  ac- 


28  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

cidentally  you  know,  every  now  and  then,  and  they  get 
Tery  pally.  She's  hoping,  she  says,  that  he'll  invite  her 
to  one  of  his  parties.  They  must  be  pretty  terrific  from 
all  accounts." 

"I  got  the  impression,"  Henry  observed,  "from  John's 
biography  of  him,  that  he's  a  bachelor." 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Violet.  "It  comes  to  that,  any 
how.  He  lives  in  that  big  apartment  all  by  himself.  At 
least  ..."  she  qualified,  and  broke  off  with  a  glance  to 
ward  her  daughter. 

"You  needn't  mind  me,"  Dorothy  said  quietly.  "I'm 
reading  The  Literary  Digest. — All  the  same,"  the  girl 
went  on,  looking  up  at  Henry  from  the  magazine  her 
glance  had  fallen  upon,  "I  think  that  sort  of  inventor 
would  be  a  wonderful  person  to  have  about.  Mostly 
they're  so  awfully  noble  and  innocent,  aren't  they,  and 
about  a  hundred  years  old  ?  Or  is  that  just  in  the  movies  ? 
Anyhow,  I  think  you'll  like  it  a  lot.  I  wish  father  would 
give  me  a  job  in  the  new  company." 

She  rose,  then,  put  down  her  cup  and  coming  round 
behind  her  mother's  chair,  took  her  lightly  by  the 
shoulders.  "I  was  to  drag  you  away  by  force  at  a  quar 
ter  to  six,"  she  said.  (Henry  noted  how  she  had  evaded 
using  any  term  of  address.)  "It's  nearly  that,  now,  and 
you  haven't  done  your  errand  yet." 

"I'm  having  a  dinner  to-morrow  night,"  Violet  ex 
plained  to  Margaret,  "and  as  things  have  turned  out,  I'm 
simply  gorged  with  men.  Can  I  steal  you  away  from 
Henry  ?  It 's  going  to  be  frightfully  dull,  I  'm  afraid.  ..." 
Margaret  thought  she  could  come.  She  didn't  mind 
being  bored,  she  said — as  she  went  over  to  her  little  writ 
ing  desk  to  consult  her  calendar — Violet's  food  was  always 
so  wonderful. 

Dorothy  had  come  over  to  Henry  and  offered  him  her 
hand,  "for  luck."  He  retained  it  as  he  turned  to  her 
mother  and  asked,  "How  about  an  even  exchange?  Or 
wouldn't  it  be  proper?  Or  are  you  going  to  commandeer 
Dorothy,  too?" 


THE  PAWN  29 

"Yes,  it's  all  right,"  Margaret  said,  from  her  desk  in  the 
corner.  "Love  toi  Seven-thirty?" 

"Oh,  Dorothy's  perfectly — unattainable,"  Violet  told 
Henry.  "She's  dining  and  dancing  somewhere  to-morrow 
night.  I  don't  in  the  least  remember  where.  All  I  know 
is  I  accepted  eleven  invitations  for  her  for  Easter  week." 
"I'm  desolated  that  I  can't  dine  with  you,7'  Dorothy 
cried  in  the  best  accents  of  Vanity  Fair.  "It  would  be 
muck  more  amusing." 

5 

"I  call  that,"  Henry  grumbled,  after  he  had  closed  the 
door  behind  them,  "an  infernal  outrage.  Oh,  not  your 
going  out  to  dinner ! "  he  added,  for  he  had  caught  a  look 
in  his  sister's  face  that  startled  him.  "I  meant  the  way 
she's  trying  to  spoil  that  lovely  child.  John  said  to-day 
that  seventeen  was  a  devilish  age.  He's  wrong.  It's 
thirty-eight  that  is." 

"I  didn't  suppose  you  meant  about  the  dinner,"  she 
said,  her  voice  coming  rather  flat,  "and  I  supposed  you 
did  mean  Dorothy.  But  there  was  just  a  chance,  I 
thought,  that  you  resented  the  way  John  had  treated  you. ' ' 
' '  John !  In  offering  me  the  new  job,  you  mean  ?  That 's 
because  you  don't  know  about  it  yet.  Violet  spoiled 
things,  rather,  making  me  tell  it  backward.  It's  ten 
thousand  a  year,  Peg,  to  begin  with, — stock  in  the  com 
pany — independence  again,  if  the  thing  goes  right — 
something  like  old  times." 

He  tried  to  enlarge  upon  the  theme,  as  in  his  thoughts 
he'd  done  earlier — the  piano,  the  opera  seats,  clothes,  a 
good  cook,  taxicabs — but  without  getting  any  responsive 
enthusiasm  from  her  to  keep  him  afloat.  He  took  the 
other  tack,  the  fine  reassuring  compliment  they  had  paid 
him; — not  only  John  but  the  other  associates,  men  like 
Crawford  and  Gregory  Corbett — in  picking  him,  as 
they'd  unanimously  done,  for  the  responsible  task  of 
guarding  their  interests.  They  were  putting  a  lot  of 
money  into  it,  half  a  million  dollars  for  a  start. 

"It's  not  very  much  for  them,"  Margaret  demurred. 


30  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"It  wouldn't  even  have  been  very  much  for  John,  if  he 
were  paying  it  all  himself." 

In  a  sense  this  was,  of  course,  true.  The  outright  loss 
of  half  a  million  dollars  wouldn't — well,  impose  any  econ 
omies  on  Violet.  Yet  it  was  Henry's  experience  with 
rich  men  on-  their  pocketbook  side,  and  this  he  tried  to 
tell  his  sister,  that  they  didn't  take  losses  lightly,  not 
even  proportionately  insignificant  ones.  In  every  trans 
action,  big  or  little,  they  wanted  full  measure — good  se 
curity;  and  they  showed  extraordinary  skill  in  getting  it. 
That  probably  was  why  they  were  rich. 

She  asked  him  abruptly,  ""When  did  you  first  hear 
about  this?" 

"Why — just  to-day  at  lunch.  You  don't  think  I'd 
keep  a  thing  like  that  from  you.  I'm  sorry  I  told  Violet 
first,  but  it  came  up  naturally,  somehow,  and  then  I  took 
it  for  granted  that  she'd  know  anyway." 

"And  you  accepted  it  finallv — right  there  at  the  lunch 
table?" 

"No,  of  course  not.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  John  didn't 
ask  me  to.  He  knew  I'd  want  to  think  it  over — talk  it 
over  with  you." 

"How  long  did  he  give  you  to  decide?"  she  asked. 

"Well,  the  meeting  is  to-morrow  afternoon,"  said  Henry, 
and  all  the  wind  went  out  of  his  sails  on  the  admission. 
"They'll  want  to  know  before  then.  I  told  John  I'd  call 
him  up  in  the  morning." 

"That's  what  I  thought  you  might  resent."  Her  voice 
flattened  down  upon  the  words  and,  as  she  turned  away 
from  him,  they  were  hardly  audible. 

"I  don't  feel  I'm  being  unduly  hurried,"  he  assured 
her,  "if  that's  what  you  mean.  I've  already  decided,  un 
less  you've  some  serious  objection  to  urge,  that  I'll  take 
it." 

"You  haven't  decided  anything,"  she  contradicted. 
She  was  still  speaking  in  that  monotonous  tone  he  had 
learned  to  recognize  as  an  early  symptom  of  an  emotional 
disturbance  of  some  kind.  She  was  upset  over  this,  just 


THE  PAWN  31 

as  he'd  felt  she  would  be.  "You  haven't  had  any  chance 
to  decide.  You  don't  know  whether  the  process  works  or 
not.  I  don't  believe  you  know  whether  it's  ever  been 
tried  or  is  just  a  theory.  John 's  decided  it  for  you.  He's 
going  to  take  a  flyer.  He  can  afford  to  lose  as  well  as 
not.  He 's  used  you  like  a  pawn  in  a  game  of  chess — push 
ing  you  in.  It  won't  matter  to  him  whether  you're  taken 
or  not." 

He  had  no  answer  ready,  and  she  went  on  a  moment 
later  to  add  the  capstone  to  the  fanciful  edifice.  "How 
do  you  know,"  she  asked,  "that  there  isn't  some  one  else 
he  wants  your  place  in  the  bank  for?" 

"I  haven't  any  proof  that  he  doesn't,"  he  said  then, 
gently.  "But  that  doesn't  square  with  his  history.  He's 
shown  us  as  much  real  kindness  and  good  will,  during  the 
last  fifteen  years,  as  we've  found  in  anybody.  If  he 
treats  me  as  a  pawn,  it's  because  that's  what  I  really  am 
— on  the  business  chess-board." 

"You're  three  times  as  intelligent  as  he  is,"  she  pro 
tested. 

"So  was  father,"  he  reminded  her.  "Intelligence  isn't 
the  thing  they  play  this  game  with.  It  wants  a  certain 
stupidity,  really,  to  keep  you  munching  away  at  it  all  day 
long,  like  one  of  John's  Holsteins.  Father  couldn't  do 
that;  couldn't  keep  his  mind  on  it.  He  didn't  hate  it 
until  those  last  years,  because  he  began  by  getting  the 
better  of  it.  Well — of  course,  I  didn't  begin  that  way. 
And  until  John  showed  me  this  chance  to-day  at  lunch, 
it  looked  as  if  I  never  would  get  the  better  of  it,  short  of 
retiring  on  a  wretched  little  pension  when  I  was  sixty- 
five  or  so,  too  old  to  have  any  life  left.  This  thing,  of 
course,  may  fail.  I  suppose  you're  right,  that  it's  more 
than  likely  to.  But,  if  it  doesn't,  it's  a  way  out.  It's  a 
chance  to  live  a  little,  while  I  've  still  got  something  ..." 

He  pulled  up  short.  He'd  communed  with  himself  in 
this  strain  often  enough,  but  he'd  never  heard  himself 
saying  such  things  aloud. 

Margaret  remained  silent.     She  was  sitting  where  he 


32  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

couldn't  see  her  face,  so  he  went  on,  after  a  minute,  dis 
cussing  the  thing  more  soberly.  He  had  no  fear,  he  said, 
that  John  would  resent  his  deciding  against  the  offer.  He 
had  really  an  explicit  assurance  that  he  could  stay  on  at 
the  bank  if  he  wanted  to.  But  his  refusal  would  absolve 
John  from  any  further  concern  about  his  fortunes.  If  he 
wanted  to  spend  the  rest  of  his  life  as  a  discount  clerk, — 
and  this  was  really  what  his  duties  at  the  bank  amounted 
to, — he  could.  "Whereas,  if  he  took  the  new  thing — under 
John's  orders,  if  she  wanted  to  put  it  that  way — the  fail 
ure  of  the  enterprise  needn't  do  him  any  harm;  wouldn't 
if  he'd  shown  himself  capable  of  doing  his  part. 

"I  don't  deny,"  he  concluded,  in  another  irresistible 
outburst  of  candor,  "that  I'm  nervous  about  it — fright 
ened.  I'm  supposed  to  watch  Greer.  They  aren't  even 
quite  sure  he's  straight.  I  don't  know  that  I  can  watch 
him,  well  enough.  He's  the  sort  of  person  I  detest;  a  ty 
rant,  I  think,  and  a  bully.  And  of  course,  it  will  be  all 
day  long,  every  day.  But  I'm  going  to.  That's  the  price 
and  I'll  pay  it." 

"You  won't  dislike  him  long,"  she  said  raggedly;  and 
added,  "Wait  until  you  begin  going  to  those  parties  of  his 
that  Bella  Forrester  tells  about." 

The  breakdown  of  this  attempt  of  hers  to  get  on  to  a 
lighter  note  betrayed  to  him  the  fact  that  she  was  crying. 

"It's  nothing,"  she  declared,  when  he,  full  of  concern, 
came  and  sat  on  the  arm  of  her  chair  and  tried  to  comfort 
her.  " — Nothing  but  just  that  I'm  such  a  pig.  I'm  glad 
you've  got  the  chance,  and  of  course  you'd  be  perfectly 
crazy  not  to  take  it.  And  I  don't  think  the  thing  is  go 
ing  to  fail.  Even  if  it  does,  there  will  be  the  big  salary 
for  a  while,  anyhow,  and  that  will  mean  a  lot.  You've 
had  such  a  rotten  time  all  these  years!  Now  you'll  be — 
well — freer,  anyhow.  And  it  makes  it  possible  for  you  to 
marry.  That's  the  main  thing." 

He  arose  with  a  sigh  and,  in  spite  of  himself,  a  shrug. 
It  was  a  topic  that,  in  the  past  ten  years,  had  been  talked 
threadbare — oh,  more  than  that,  ragged  as  the  wind- 


THE  PAWN  33 

whipped  scare-crow  in  a  farmer's  corn-field.  He  didn't 
want  to  marry,  either  as  an  abstract  principle  or,  speci 
fically,  any  girl.  Particularly  and  almost  truculently, 
did  he  not  want  to  marry  any  of  the  girls  whom  Margaret 
picked  as  possibilities. 

To-day,  though, — somewhat  surprisingly,  too,  since  as 
a  rule  the  gloomier  Margaret  was  the  more  a  discussion  of 
his  marriage  attracted  her, — the  topic  was  checked  without 
running  its  course,  either  through  likely  candidates  or  ways 
and  means.  He  wondered,  a  little  uneasily,  if  she'd  noted 
that  impatient  gesture  of  his.  It  would  be  a  dreadful 
thing  to  be  rude  to  Margaret. 

In  a  tone  which  he  thought  really  sounded  lighter- 
hearted,  she  told  him  she  was  going  to  let  him  off  his  us 
ual  lecture. 

"It  won't  be  necessary  any  more,  because  it's  going  to 
be  possible  now  for  you  to  have  a  little  fun.  Not  being 
held  down — as  you've  been,  poor  old  boy,  all  these  years 
— you're  going  to  blossom  out,  I  can  see  that.  You'll  meet 
a  lot  of  amusing  people,  and  you'll  find  somebody." 

"At  one  of  Joe  Greer's  parties?"  he  asked,  in  good- 
humored  irony.  "One  of  his  beautiful  demi-mondaines? 
Can't  you  just  imagine  what  a  thrilling  object  I'd  be  to  a 
person  like  that?" 

There  were  humorous  possibilities  in  the  theme,  and  he 
glanced  around  at  her  for  the  tolerant  smile  which  would 
have  encouraged  him  to  embroider  upon  it.  But  she'd 
fallen  into  an  abstraction,  looked  as  if  she  hadn't  heard  a 
word  he'd  said. 

He  was  left  curiously  at  a  loss.  He  could  think  of  noth 
ing  to  say.  Yet  the  protracted  silence  was  irksome,  al 
most  painful,  to  him.  He  stood  there  for  a  moment  over 
the  table  where  earlier  he  had  thrown  the  still-folded  even 
ing  paper.  About  the  act  of  opening  it  out  and  sitting 
down  in  the  easy  chair  to  read,  there  would  be,  it  seemed 
to  him,  a  sort  of  brutality.  The  silver  box  beside  it  con 
tained  cigarettes — for  occasions  when  they  had  guests;  at 
other  times  he  and  Margaret  very  rarely  smoked.  In  a 


34          JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

kind  of  desperation,  he  took  one  now.    As  he  turned  away 
to  get  a  match  from  the  mantel-shelf,  she  spoke. 

"I  wish  the  war  hadn't  stopped  so  soon  after  mother 
died,"  she  said;  and  added,  with  an  outburst  of  cold  pas 
sion,  "If  it  had  gone  on  another  year,  I  might  have  had  a 
chance,  too."  That  was  all;  the  gust  had  spent  itself. 
With  hardly  a  pause,  she  added,  "I  think  I'd  better  go  out 
and  help  Lydia  with  the  dinner." 

He  had  his  cigarette  alight  by  now  and  it  did  fortify 
him  a  little. 

"How  about  the  Blackstone  to-night,  instead?"  he  sug 
gested.  "By  way  of  ushering  in  the  good  times." 

She  gave  him  at  that  a  most  amazing  look.  Had  it  not 
been  Margaret,  and  at  him,  her  brother,  that  she  looked, 
you'd  have  said  there  was  a  momentary  gleam  in  it  of 
downright  hate.  It  was  gone  in  a  flash,  and  she  said  in  a 
commonplace  tone  enough :  ' '  Oh,  not  to-night,  Henry  dear. 
I'm  feeling  rotten." 

6 

The  meeting  the  next  afternoon  was,  so  far  as  its  actual 
proceedings  went,  a  dull  affair,  the  inevitable  legal  hocus 
pocus  occupying  most  of  the  time.  Two  lawyers  were 
present,  a  man  named  Nathan,  who  seemed  to  be  Greer's 
attorney,  and,  across  the  table,  young  Craig  from  Aldrich  's 
office,  who  acted  at  first  as  secretary  of  the  meeting. 
Sometimes  they  differed  solemnly  and,  it  seemed  to  Henry, 
interminably,  over  a  trivial  matter  of  phrasing.  Sometimes 
one  of  the  principals  took  a  hand.  Once  Henry  heard 
Craig  say  to  John  Williamson,  "Mr.  Aldrich  will  accept 
this.  He  gave  me  a  special  memorandum  on  it."  It 
might,  from  the  solemnity  with  which  he  spoke,  have  been 
a  special  tablet  from  Mount  Sinai,  and  John  nodded  with 
an  air  of  complete  satisfaction,  his  momentary  uneasiness 
quite  banished.  To  Henry,  trying  hard  to  keep  awake, 
this  seemed  mildly  ludicrous. 

But  there  were  two  outstanding  features  of  the  after 
noon.  One  was  the  place  where  the  meeting  occurred — 
Greer  's  offices  in  an  upper  story  of  one  of  the  taller  build- 


THE  PAWN  35 

ings  which  look  out  at  the  lake  across  Michigan  Boulevard ; 
the  other  was  the  light  which  this  environment  shed  upon 
the  man  who  had  created  it. 

Henry's  approach  had  been  down  a  narrow  corridor 
past  a  row  of  small  private  offices  (one  of  them  to  be,  from 
now  on,  his  own).  The  room  was  as  big  as  the  directors' 
room  in  John  Williamson's  suite,  but  the  chaste,  almost 
vacuous,  impersonality  of  John's — throne  room  found  its 
complete  antithesis  here.  This  room  was  a  place  wrhere  a 
man  very  largely  lived;  and  that  man  Joseph  Greer,  and 
nobody  else.  His  desk  occupied  a  not  very  important 
position  in  the  corner  of  it.  Two  draughting  tables  stood 
over  near  the  windows,  although  a  glimpse  through  an 
open  door  revealed  a  large  draughting-room  beyond,  in  the 
other  arm  of  the  L.  The  wall  space  was  crowded  with 
firing  cabinets  and  sectional  book-cases,  and  the  walls  them 
selves  hung  thick  with  framed  drawings,  plans,  perspec 
tives,  strange  designs,  photographs  of  machines. 

About  these  latter,  all  of  them  inexplicable  to  Henry, 
there  was,  he  noted  with  surprise,  a  look  of  ...  He 
stopped  on  the  edge  of  calling  it  beauty,  and  adopted 
style  instead.  Odd  that  he  should  take  that  impression 
when  he  hadn't  an  idea  what  any  of  them  was  about! 

The  table  the  new  directors  were  beginning  to  gather 
around  was  a  big  solid  affair  of  oak,  the  varnish  of  its  top 
pretty  wyell  worn  away  and -the  edges  pitted  by  the  hot 
ends  of  innumerable  cigarettes — laid  down  by  preoccupied 
men  who  had  needed  both  hands  while  they  talked.  A 
shabby,  serviceable  room,  cluttered  with  heterogeneous 
objects — samples,  models.  In  a  big  box  on  the  floor  were 
a  number  of  little  bundles — of  straw,  of  fiber,  of  tow,  of 
combed-out  stuff  that  might  be  meant  for  a  wig  for  Mar 
guerite,  in  Faust.  The  linen  they  were  going  to  make,  of 
course !  Successive  processes. 

Well,  \vhen  Greer  came  in — late ;  he  was  the  last  man  to 
arrive — you  saw  at  once  that  he  belonged  here.  You  per 
ceived  that  all  you  had  been  sensing,  during  the  twenty 
minutes'  wait  he  had  imposed  on  you,  was  nothing  but  an 


36  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

outlying  part  of  the  man  himself.  And  it  might  be  (one 
mustn't  jump  to  conclusions)  his  truest  index.  Those 
"terrific"  parties — for  actresses! — which  had  so  fasci 
nated  Bella  Forrester  might  not,  indeed,  be  a  myth,  but 
there  was  no  doubt  left  in  Henry's  mind  that  many  a  mid 
night  must  have  found  him  here,  in  his  shirt,  sweating 
under  the  white  glare  of  electric  light  over  one  of  those 
draughting  tables. 

He  seemed  much  less  objectionably  self-assertive  here 
than  in  John 's  office  yesterday.  Possibly,  Henry  thought, 
because  he  had  more  real  self-assurance.  He  spoke  more 
quickly,  exhibited  what  seemed  like  a  real  concern  that  he 
should  have  been  late  and  took  the  trouble  to  explain  that 
his  tardiness  was  unavoidable.  He  roused  a  sympathetic 
vibration  in  Henry,  too,  by  showing  himself  desperately 
bored  by  the  phrase-mongering  of  the  two  lawyers  and  the 
long  drawn-out  liturgy  of  legal  fictions  which  they  insisted 
upon. 

On  the  whole,  then,  except  for  the  other  outstanding 
feature  of  the  afternoon,  Henry's  fears  and  misgivings 
would  have  been  pretty  well  laid  to  rest. 

But  Greer  sprang  a  sensation,  along  in  the  middle  of  the 
meeting.  Of  the  permanent  directors,  three,  by  agree 
ment,  were  to  be  elected  at  his  nomination;  himself,  of 
course,  his  lawyer,  Nathan,  and  J.  MacArthur,  who  was, 
also  by  agreement,  to  be  made  secretary  of  the  company. 
When  the  election  had  taken  place  and  they  were  ready 
to  go  on  as  a  directors'  meeting,  John  turned  to  Greer  and 
asked : 

"Where  is  MacArthur?  If  he's  to  be  secretary,  he 
ought  to  be  here  to  take  charge  of  the  minutes.  Can  you 
get  hold  of  him?" 

Joe's  answer  was  to  tilt  back  in  his  chair  and,  reaching 
around  without  rising,  press  a  button  on  his  desk.  Henry 
guessed  in  that  instant  from  a  gleam  in  his  eye,  that  some 
thing  was  going  to  happen. 

When  an  office  boy  answered  the  buzzer,  Greer  said, 
"Ask  Miss  MacArthur  to  come  in." 


THE  PAWN  37 

Well,  there  was  nothing  unprecedented  about  it,  of 
course.  Plenty  of  women  were  directors  of  companies 
and  officers,  too.  But  that  they  should  have  been  led 
into  electing  her  in  the  dark  like  this  gave  them  a  sense 
of  having  been  tricked.  John  and  Gregory  Corbett  looked 
pretty  blank.  Greer  glanced  around  from  one  set  serious 
face  to  the  next  with  an  open  grin.  He  let  the  silence 
last  a  moment  or  two,  then  said: 

"She  was  secretary  of  my  old  company — The  Fiber 
Products — and  I  give  you  my  word,  gentlemen,  she  can't 
be  beat." 

The  door  opened  just  then,  and  she  came  in.  They  all 
got  up,  of  course,  and  Greer,  still  wearing  the  remains  of 
his  grin,  introduced  them  around. 

Her  manner,  if  not  her  appearance,  was  immediately 
reassuring.  She  acknowledged  the  introductions  compos 
edly  enough,  and  then  took  young  Craig's  chair  at  Greer 's 
right  hand.  Two  or  three  cleanly  directed  questions  and 
a  cursory  look  through  his  notes  put  her  abreast  of  the  sit 
uation.  The  routine  of  the  meeting  could  now  proceed. 
She  knew  her  business,  so  much  was  easy  to  see. 

Yet  she  was  not,  Henry  felt,  quite  the  type  of  business 
woman  he  was  acquainted  with.  Her  dress  had  a  somewhat 
mannish  air  which  these,  as  a  rule,  are  careful  to  avoid. 
It  was  a  suit  of  light-colored  homespun,  quite  new  and 
rather  smart  in  its  severity.  Certainly  none  of  the  women 
who  worked  in  the  bank  wore  clothes  like  that.  And  then 
it  struck  him  that  she  was  wearing  a  hat,  a  high-crowned, 
narrow-brimmed  sailor  of  mahogany  colored  straw,  sen 
sible  and  rather  severe — though  it  went  well  with  her  red 
hair.  But  why  a  hat  at  all,  if  she  belonged  here — as 
Greer  had  just  explicitly  declared  she  did?  For  that 
matter,  why  the  jacket,  which  she  loosened  and  threw 
back  when  she  took  her  place  at  the  table  ?  Why  not  the 
skirt  and  blouse  which  they'd  all  have  taken  for  granted, 
without  a  thought,  as  the  natural  thing? 

Wasn't  this,  Henry  wondered,  exactly  the  reason? 
Wasn't  it  her  wish  to  avoid  being  taken  for  granted  as  a 


38  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

mere — stenographic  convenience?  Hadn't  that  hat  a  real 
social  significance?  Mightn't  it  be  a  delicate  assertion  of 
her  equal  voice  and  vote  with  the  rest  of  themj?  She  was 
a  clever  woman  if  she  was  capable  of  seizing  a  nuance  like 
that.  And  unusually  self-assured,  too — unless  Greer  had 
put  her  up  to  it.  But  Greer  wouldn't  have  thought  of 
It. 

The  idea  amused  Henry.  He  settled  back  a  little  more 
contentedly  in  his  chair,  watchful  to  see  what  the  others 
made  of  her;  how,  as  time  went  on,  they  took  her.  He 
wasn't  at  all  sure  how  he  was  going  to  take  her,  himself. 

No  doubt  she  was  competent;  irritatingly  so,  he  might 
find  her.  She  never  was  at  an  instant's  loss  for  any  of 
their  names,  for  example,  though  they'd  been  flung  at  her 
all  in  a  jumble.  And  one  or  two  small  tangles  she  straight 
ened  out  almost  negligently.  There  was  something  rather 
shrewd  about  her;  canny,  perhaps,  was  the  word.  She'd 
turn  out,  he  guessed,  to  be  Scotch  rather  than  Irish.  How 
old?  Oh,  around  Margaret's  age,  perhaps,  or  even  his 
own.  Not  young,  certainly.  But  distinctly  good  to  look 
at.  That  was  a  really  lovely  skin  she  had,  for  all  its  pow 
der  of  freckles.  And  it  was  interesting  to  watch  the  re 
strained  play  of  her  eyebrows  and  her  thin  expressive  lips. 

Presently,  his  gaze  got  diverted  from  her  face  to  John's 
across  the  table  from  her.  John  had  felt  the  inclination 
for  another  smoke,  drawn  one  of  his  thick  cigars  from  its 
case,  bitten  off  the  end  of  it  and  struck  a  match.  It  was 
at  this  instant  that  Henry  looked  at  him,  saw  him  hesitate, 
glance  at  her  and  then,  dubiously,  around  the  room.  It 
was  pretty  thick,  of  course;  they'd  all,  or  most  of  them, 
been  smoking  in  there  for  hours.  John  shook  out  his 
match,  content,  apparently,  to  wait  until  there  should 
have  been  an  opportunity  to  air  out  a  bit. — A  triumph  for 
the  hat,  no  doubt. 

She,  with  her  attention  on  the  man  who  was  talking,  had 
missed  the  by-play.  But  Greer  had  not,  and  his  response 
to  it  was,  with  a  grin,  to  get  out  his  own  cigarette  case, 
spring  it  open  and  hold  it  out  to  Miss  MacArthur;  fairly, 
indeed,  under  her  nose. 


THE  PAWN  39 

She  might  well  have  been  startled  by  the  prank,  Henry 
reflected.  She  might  have  been  painfully  embarrassed  by 
the  implication  in  it.  Business  women,  so  far  as  he  knew 
— secretaries  and  such — didn't  smoke;  not,  at  least,  with 
their  employers  during  office  hours.  But  this  woman  was 
neither  startled  nor  embarrassed.  She  declined  the  offer 
with  a  mere  unceremonious  shake  of  the  head  and  without 
a  glance  at  Greer.  A  quarter  of  a  minute  later,  though, 
there  flickered  across  her  lips  just  the  faintest  smile;  a 
mere  quirk  or  dimple  at  one  corner  of  her  rather  wide 
mouth.  A  moment  later  she  glanced  across  at  John,  and, 
seeing  him  a  little  at  a  loss,  his  unlighted  cigar  in  one  hand 
and  the  extinguished  match  still  in  the  fingers  of  the 
other,  she  told  him  not  to  mind  her.  She'd  been  thor 
oughly  smoke-cured  years  ago. 

That  smile  of  hers  grew  more  suggestive  and  disquieting 
to  Henry  the  more  he  thought  of  it.  He  rummaged  about 
for  an  adjective  that  satisfactorily  fitted  it.  Contemp 
tuous?  It  was  as  hard  as  that  but  friendlier.  Tolerant? 
That  wasn't  active  enough.  Familiar?  Oh,  closer  than 
that!  Domestic — that  perhaps  was  as  well  as  he  could  do. 
He'd  seen  just  that  look  go  over  Violet's  face  when  John, 
in  a  rare  mood,  was  being  outrageous  and  she  was  amused 
in  spite  of  herself.  It  was  a  look  of  one  who  has  learned 
from  long  experience  with  a  man  that  remonstrance  will 
only  make  him  worse.  It  was  a  look,  too,  of  pure  amuse 
ment,  which  meant,  of  course,  that  his  prank  hadn't  rat 
tled  her  the  least  bit  in  the  world.  Formidable  as  Greer 
might  be,  it  was  plain  enough  that  Miss  J.  MacArthur 
wasn't  afraid  of  him. 

Henry  was  drifting,  he  perceived,  toward  a  really  start 
ling  conclusion.  Was  he  going  too  far?  On  any  accepted 
theory  of  evidence,  certainly  he  was.  Suppose  he  walked 
along  with  John  after  the  meeting  was  over,  and  John 
asked  him  what  he  thought  of  the  secretary  and  director 
whom  Greer  had  so  dramatically  sprung  upon  them,  and 
suppose  he  were  to  reply  that  he'd  come  to  the  conclusion 
she  was  Greer 's  mistress,  and  give  his  only  reason.  Heav 
ens  !  John  would  think  him  a  lunatic. 


40  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

This,  perhaps,  explains  why,  when  the  meeting  broke 
up,  Henry  avoided  leaving  the  room  until  after  John  and 
Gregory  Corbett  did.  It  was  easy,  for  they  were  prompt 
about  getting  away.  His  delay,  occupied  by  the  metic 
ulous  adjustment  of  his  muffler  before  putting  on  his 
overcoat,  gave  Miss  MacArthur  an  opportunity,  almost 
an  invitation,  perhaps,  to  come  up  and  speak  to  him. 

' '  Wouldn  't  you  like  to  see  your  new  office,  Mr.  Craven, 
before  you  go?" 

Her  voice  certainly  had  nothing — meretricious  about  it, 
and  its  timbre  and  intonation  were  grateful  to  the  ear. 
He  followed  her  down  the  corridor  with  a  curiously  stimu 
lating  sense  of  adventure.  This  notion  he  'd  come  to  about 
her,  though  shocking,  of  course,  to  the  whole  moral  fab 
ric  of  his  nature,  hadn't  at  all  the  effect  of  making  her 
personally  repulsive  to  him.  "Was  it  possible  that  it  cut  the 
other  way?  Created  a  real  attraction?  He  was  startled 
by  the  suspicion  that  it  did. 

The  room  she  ushered  him  into  was  intrinsically  just 
the  conventional  quartered  oak  and  ground  glass  box-stall. 
But  its  one  broad  window  looked  east,  and  at  this  height 
— the  eighteenth  or  twentieth  story — they  seemed  almost 
to  overhang  the  lake.  Three  paces  back  from  the  sill,  it 
was  all  you  could  see.  It  was  amazingly  brilliant  to-day, 
for  there  was  an  east  wind  which  swept  it  clean  of  smoke 
and  the  sky  was  splotched  with  a  cloud  or  two  which  threw 
shadows  of  an  incredible  purple  upon  the  blue  water. 

Involuntarily  Henry  gazed  and  held  his  breath.  How 
in  the  world,  he  wondered,  could  he  do  any  work  in  the 
face  of  a  view  like  that !  He  wouldn  't  have  dared  say  this, 
of  course,  to  the  new  secretary,  but  she  must  have  come 
somewhere  near  guessing  it  from  his  look,  for  she  remarked, 
"We  all  had  to  get  used  to  that." 

She  went  on,  after  a  glance  which  indicated  she  had  got 
used  to  it:  "This  was  Mr.  Ferris 's  office.  He  was  treas 
urer  of  the  old  company.  At  least,"  she  added  without 
a  smile,  "he  was  called  treasurer." 

He  perceived  plainly  enough  that  she  meant  to  tell  him 


THE  PAWN  41 

something  and  waited,  with  a  trepidation  he  was  afraid 
wasn't  quite  concealed,  for  her  to  go  on. 

''I  only  meant,"  she  explained,  "that  Mr.  Greer  is  al 
ways  so  full  of  the  one  thing  that  happens  to  be  on  his 
mind  that  the  rest  of  us  have  to  catch  hold  just  anywhere 
and  fill  in." 

"I  don't  know  how  good  I  shall  be  at  that,"  Henry 
said, — for  it  broke  over  him  that  with  this  penetrating 
young  woman  no  pretense  to  infallibility  would  carry  him 
very  far.  "You  see  I've  always  been  at  the  bank  where 
the  work  is  very  thoroughly  routined.  I'm  afraid  I'll 
have  to  rely  on  you  to  help  me,  anyhow  at  first." 

"Call  on  me  any  time  for  anything,"  she  said  good- 
humoredly.  "That  seems  to  be  the  one  thing  I'm  for. 
My  office  is  right  here  next  to  yours,"  she  added,  after 
opening  the  communicating  door:  "Of  course,  now  we're 
opening  the  new  books,  there  will  be  a  lot  of  things  that 
you're  the  only  one  who  will  know  anything  about.  I've 
always  wished  I  was  an  accountant,  but  I've  never  had 
time  to  learn  more  than  the  beginnings  of  it.  We'll  see 
you  Monday?" 

He  said  he  supposed  so,  and  at  that,  with  a  nod,  she 
went  into  her  own  office  and  closed  the  door  behind  her. 

He  dropped  down  into  the  swivel  chair — his  swivel 
chair  now — feeling  the  imperative  need  of  a  few  minutes 
in  which  to  get  himself  together.  But  before  the  process 
of  recollection  had  fairly  found  time  to  begin,  he  heard 
steps — Greer 's,  he  was  sure — come  down  the  corridor  and 
turn  into  the  secretary's  office. 

"Oh,  hello,"  he  heard  her  say.  "I  thought  you'd 
gone. ' ' 

The  other  said — it  was  Greer — "God,  what  an  after 
noon!"  and  plumped  down  heavily  on  something, — her 
desk  it  sounded  more  like  than  a  chair.  They  were  as 
easily  audible  in  there  to  Henry,  through  the  Saturday  af 
ternoon  stillness,  as  if  they'd  been  in  the  same  room  with 
him. 

"Well,"  Greer  went  on  after  striking  a  match,  "I  guess 


42  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

we're  really  started,  at  last.  I  don't  believe  there's  any 
more  damned  fee-fo-fum  that  they  can  think  of.  What 
do  you  think  of  the  new  ..." 

She  silenced  him — somehow,  and  must  have  let  him 
know,  in  pantomime,  that  the  man  he  meant  to  ask  about 
was  in  the  next  room.  There  was  a  moment  of  silence — 
an  agonizing  moment  for  Henry — then  a  grunt  from 
Greer  and  the  sound  of  his  rising. 

"See  you  to-morrow?"  he  asked,  in  a  tone  a  little  lower 
but  not  much.  "How  about  dinner  up  at  the  flat?  My 
train  doesn't  go  until  midnight." 

"I  can't  come  to  dinner.  But  lunch  is  all  right,  if  you 
like,  and  the  rest  of  the  afternoon. ' ' 

"Damn  it,  Jennie,  can't  you  leave  the  one  decent  work 
day  in  the  week  alone?" 

"You  have  too  many  work  days  as  it  is.  I'll  be  there 
at  one,  but  I  won't  wait.  So  if  you're  at  work  and  don't 
feel  like  stopping,  you  needn't." 

"Oh,  all  right!  One  o'clock,  then.  You're  an  infer 
nal  tyrant,  Jennie." 

"So  would  you  be,  Joe  (or  did  she  call  him  Joey?),  if 
you  got  the  chance,  I  guess." 

A  moment  of  silence;  then,  from  Greer,  "Well,  crank  up 
your  little  Ford  and  buzz  along.  "Where  are  you  parked  ? ' ' 

"Just  around  the  corner.     Can  I  take  you  anywhere?" 

If  he  answered,  it  was  with  nothing  more  than  a  gesture. 
The  next  moment  Henry  heard  her  going. 

Then,  before  he  could  move  or  think,  the  communicating 
door  was  thrown  open,  and  Greer,  at  peace  with  the  world 
and  certainly  unashamed,  came  in  upon  him.  He  gave 
Henry  an  amicable  smile,  pleased  to  find  him  there  and 
not — thank  Heaven — the  least  in  the  world  surprised.  Be 
fore  speaking,  he  devoted  a  moment  to  a  prodigious  yawn 
and  stretch. 

"Well,"  he  said,  as  he  squeezed  the  water  out  of  his 
eyes,  "that's  over.  We're  through  with  that  sort  of 
hoakum  for  a  while,  anyway.  You  found  it  as  dull  as  I 
did,  I  could  see  that.  Let 's  go  somewhere  and  have  a  chin. 


THE  PAWN  43 

—And  a  drink,"  he  added.      "I'm  dryer  right  now  than 
this  country  will  ever  be." 


The  idea  of  assisting  at  Joe's  drink  didn't  disturb 
Henry.  He  assumed  a  corner  in  some  decorous  club.  But 
when  he  found  his  companion  guiding  him  through  the 
swing  doors  of  \vhat  was,  in  effect,  nothing  but  a  common, 
saloon  although  it  was  run  in  connection  with  one  of  the 
Boulevard  hotels,  he  experienced  a  strong  impulse  to  bolt. 
He  hadn  't  been  inside  a  place  like  this  in  years ; — the  bank 
took  a  very  high  line  in  such  matters.  But  he  wasn't  ex* 
pected,  he  found,  to  stand  up  to  the  long  bar  and  put  his 
foot  on  a  brass  rail. 

Greer  piloted  him  back  into  a  sort  of  grill  where,  ap 
parently,  food  was  to  be  had  as  well  as  liquor,  and  when 
Henry,  asked  what  he  would  have,  opted  indifferently  for 
ginger  ale,  his  host  said,  ' '  You  can  have  anything  you  like, 
of  course, — coffee,  tea  ? ' ' 

"That's  what  I'd  really  like,"  said  Henry,  "a  pot  of 
orange  pekoe,  if  I  may." 

Greer  nodded  confirmation  of  this  to  the  waiter,  order 
ed  bourbon  for  himself  and  then  told  Henry  that  he  liked 
tea  but  found  it  too  stimulating.  He  had  tried,  he  guessed, 
everything  to  drink  that  there  was  in  the  world,  and  had, 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  most  innocent  of  all  bev 
erages  was  honest  corn  whisky.  But  he  didn  't  go  on  from 
there,  as  Henry  feared  he  would,  to  discuss  the  dark  incred 
ible  approach  of  Prohibition.  (This  was  in  April,  1919.) 
There  was  something  he  really  wanted  to  talk  about. 

"What  do  you  make  of  Williamson?"  he  asked  ab 
ruptly. 

"Make  of  him?"  Henry  echoed.  "Why,  I  don't  know. 
I've  known  him,  you  see,  for  a  great  many  years.  He 
married  a  cousin  of  mine." 

"Married,  is  he?"  Greer  reflected.  Then,  "Living 
with  his  wife?" 

Henry  jumped.     ' '  Yes, ' '  he  said.     ' '  Oh,  yes,  certainly. ' ' 


44 

Apparently,  from  his  host's  point  of  view,  it  was  by  no 
means  a  corollary.  But,  having  received  Henry's  assur 
ance  on  the  point,  he  was  content  to  let  it  drop  and  go 
back  to  the  main  theme. 

""Well,  I  don't  get  any  of  .these  fellows,"  he  said;  "the 
financial  gang.  I  don't  see  how  they  get  away  with  it. 
I  don't  see  how  they  keep  themselves  alive.  Oh,  I  know 
you're  on  their  side.  You  were  in  the  bank,  weren't  you* 
And  they  put  you  in  here  to  keep  an  eye  on  me.  But 
you're  no  more  like  them  really,  than  I  am.  I  saw  that 
well  enough  at  the  meeting.  There  were  a  dozen  times 
to-day  when  we  both  wanted  to  say,  'to  hell  with  it.'  But 
you've  worked  for  'em,  seen  'em  close  to,  so  I  thought 
maybe  you  could  tell  me  the  answer." 

"I'm  not  sure  I  quite  understand  what  it  is  you  find 
puzzling  about  them,"  Henry  said,  sipping  his  tea  and 
feeling  queerly  at  ease  for  the  moment  with  his  com 
panion.  "I've  worked  for  them,  as  you  say,  a  good  part 
of  my  life,  but  they've  never  struck  me  as — enigmatic,  es 
pecially.  Of  course,  they're — my  own  people.  But 
you're  quite  right  that  I'm  not  one  of  them. — I'd  have 
been  a  musician,  if  I  could,"  he  added. 

"There  you  are,"  said  Greer;  "that's  something.  I 
suppose  music's  just  a  form  of  engineering,  really,  only  it 
happens  to  be  one  that  a  man  can't  make  a  living  by — un 
less  he's  a  sort  of  freak.  Well  then,  you're  a  musician; 
I'm  an  engineer.  But  what  the  devil  are  they?  What 
do  they  see  ?  What  do  they  think  they  see  ?  Oh,  money, 
of  course,  but  money 's  nothing  but  a  way  of  getting  things 
done.  What  is  it  they're  trying  to  get  done?  If  I  had 
Williamson's  money,  I'd  do  something  with  it.  So  would 
you.  I  doubt  if  he  even  has  fun  with  it.  Not  as  much 
as  I  have — on  perhaps  a  twentieth  as  much.  Round  and 
round  he  goes  looking  for  safe  investments  for  an  income 
that's  already  five  or  six  times  what  he  can  spend; — 
making  more  work  for  himself  all  the  time." 

"I  suppose,"  Henry  put  in,  "that  it's  really  power  he 
•wants  rather  than  money." 


THE  PAWN  45 

The  other  man  snatched  the  word  away  from  him. 
"Power!  I  understand  power,  or  I  think  I  do.  Power 
is  what  can  be  used  to  move  something.  Well  now,  see 
here !  Here 's  a  man  who 's  got  a  hobby  for  buying  elec 
tric  storage  cells  and  charging  them,  and  he  goes  on  col 
lecting  more  and  more  of  them  and  you  go  to  him  and 
say,  'What  are  you  going  to  do  with  all  this?'  and  he  says, 
'Oh,  I'm  going  to  run  a  motor-generator  outfit  to  charge 
more  cells.'  Couldn't  you  take  him  before  a  judge  and 
get  a  conservator  appointed  on  the  strength  of  that?  Of 
course  you  could.  Well,  what's  the  difference?  What 
does  Williamson  want  to  run?  The  city?  He  could,  if 
he  liked — Roger  Sullivan  did.  A  railroad?  A  steam 
ship  line?  An  opera  company?  A  harem?  I  don't  care 
what.  But  it  ought  to  be  something." 

Henry  said  at  this  point  that  John  did  run,  or  had  a 
voice  in  running,  an  immense  number  of  things.  There 
were  a  dozen  directorates  that  Henry  knew  he  served  on, 
and  there  might  be  as  many  more  he'd  never  heard  about. 

"Exactly,"  said  Greer.  "But  his  interest  is  financial 
in  every  case,  isn't  it,  not  operative.  He's  guarding  his 
dividends,  or  increasing  'em.  Here's  an  example  of  it  right 
here;  this  company  of  ours.  It's  three  months  since  I 
went  to  him  about  it.  I  had  a  letter  from  Corbett;  that's 
how  I  got  to  him.  Well,  he  was  interested  all  right. 
There  were  three  points  to  my  proposition:  the  linen 
famine  that  was  coming  because  of  the  state  of  things  in 
Russia,  the  sixteen  hundred  thousand  tons  of  flax  straw 
that's  grown  every  year  in  this  country  and  burnt  by  the 
farmers  in  the  fields,  and  the  fact  that  I  had  a  commer 
cial  process  for  making  that  flax  straw  into  linen. 

"Well,  the  first  two  of  those  propositions  really  inter 
ested  him,  fastened  themselves  in  his  mind.  The  third 
simply  was  true  or  it  wasn't.  He  hires  Fuller,  Price  and 
Company  to  make  him  a  report  on  the  thing.  They  look 
me  up  along  with  the  rest  of  it.  They  typewrite  it  all 
out  on  sixteen  gauge  paper,  bind  it  up  in  blltck  Morocco 
and  send  it  to  him; — charge  him  a  couple  of  thousand 


46  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

dollars  for  it. — Well,  if  they've  got  the  whole  story  of  my 
life  in  it,  it's  cheap  at  the  price." 

He  illuminated  this  parenthesis  with  a  dazzling  grin, 
but  went  straight  on.  ''Williamson  reads  it,  or,  for  all 
I  know,  hires  somebody  else  to  read  it  for  him,  and  sends 
me  word  he'll  go  in.  But  in  all  this  time — three  months, 
mind  you — he's  never  come  out  to  our  laboratory  on  the 
West  Side,  where  he  could  have  seen  the  thing  done,  act 
ually  done  under  semi-commercial  conditions  He  doesn't 
care  about  how  it's  done.  Nor,  for  that  matter,  what  we 
do.  Any  damn  thing  in  the  world  that  would  show  the 
same  profit  between  raw  material  and  finished  product, 
and  the  same  demand,  would  interest  him  just  as  much,— 
it  would  ~be  the  same  thing  to  him. 

"Cellulose  fiber  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  things  in 
the  world.  I've  been  thinking  about  it,  off  and  on,  ever 
since  the  first  time  I  found  myself  in  a  tropical  jungle. 
And  the  things  you  can  do  by  dissolving  it,  or  by  matting 
and  compressing  it,  or  by  using  it  as  a  binder  in  plastic 
substances — there's  no  end.  And  we're  just  at  the  begin 
ning,  back  in  the  Old  Testament.  But  it  might  be  putty 
for  all  Williamson  cares, — or  prunes." 

He  interrupted  himself  here  to  take  another  drink,  and 
Henry  said: 

"You're  partly  right,  of  course,  but  he  knows  more 
about  that  process  of  yours  than  you  think.  And  he  knows 
he's  not  a  technical  man.  It  may  be  caution  as  much  as 
lack  of  interest  that's  kept  him  away." 

Greer  caught  that  instantly  over  the  edge  of  his  up 
raised  glass.  Henry  found  that  glance  of  his  curiously 
stimulating. 

"Anyhow,"  Henry  went  on,  "he  told  me  himself  quite 
a  little  about  it — about  the — bug,  he  called  it,  that  you'd 
discovered. ' ' 

"Hell!"  said  Greer,  putting  down  his  glass.  "I  didn't 
discover  any  bug.  I'm  not  a  bacteriologist.  I  hired  a 
fellow — a  young  professor  of  botany  at  one  of  the  uni 
versities,  and  told  him  to  discover  it.  It  took  him  more 


THE  PAWN  47 

than  a  year,  and  if  I  hadn't  been  there  to  speed  him  up 
it  might  have  taken  him  twenty.  They're  queer  birds, 
too,  these  pure  scientists,  when  it  comes  to  that.  They 
don't  care  what  any  thing's  for  any  more  than  the  bankers 
care  how  it  works.  It  isn  't  till  a  man  like  me  comes  along 
and  takes  one  in  one  hand  and  another  in  the  other  and 
cracks  their  heads  together  that  anything  really  happens 
in  the  world." 

The  inward  grimace  Henry  allowed  himself  at  this  ntust 
have  shown  some  reflection  in  his  face,  perceptible  to 
Greer,  for  almost  instantly,  with  a  shrug  and  a  smile,  he 
went  on: 

"That  sounds  like  brag  to  you.  Perhaps  it  is.  But 
we're  trying  to  get  acquainted,  aren't  we?  The  sooner 
we  do,  the  better  all  around;  isn't  that  the  idea?  Well, 
then,  you  may  as  well  know  that  I  think  I'm  a  better  man 
than  John  Williamson  or  any  of  his  crowd.  I  think  you 
are,  too,  and  that  you  know  it.  He  inherited  his  money, 
didn't  he?  Wasn't  old  Nick  Williamson  his  father? 
Well,  the  old  man,  I  guess,  had  the  goods.  But  his  son, — 
why,  he's  had  everything  done  for  him.  Turn  him  out  in 
the  woods  without  a  guide  and  a  pack-train,  and  I  don 't  be 
lieve  he  could  keep  alive  a  month.  I  don't  believe  he 
could  have  earned  his  living  with  his  hands  and  educated 
himself  for  a  profession  at  the  same  time.  Well,  I  did 
that,  and  I've  done  the  other.  And  I  could  do  it  again 
if  I  had  to,  though  I  am  fifty  years  old." 

"Fifty!"  Henry's  surprise  was  genuine.  He'd  been 
thinking  of  the  man  as  a  contemporary. 

Greer  nodded.     "Unless  I've  lost  count,"  he  said. 

He  paused  reflectively  over  his  drink,  and  gave  Henry 
a  chance  he  had  uncomfortably  been  waiting  for. 

"Of  course,"  he  said,  "I  couldn't  keep  alive  in  the 
woods  either,  not  even  as  long  as  John.  I  could  hardly 
have  kept  alive,  I'm  afraid,  even  in  the  ordinary  ways  of 
civilization  if  I  hadn't  been  helped.  And  the  person  who 
gave  me  that  help,  with  a  perfectly  ungrudging  kindness, 
was  John  Williamson." 


48  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"Well,  your  game's  a  different  game  from  his  and  from 
mine,"  Greer  said.  "You're  like  some  other  people  I 
know,  writers  and  painters  and  such.  All  you  really  ask 
for  is  a  chance  to  look  on.  But  you  can  see  what  I'm 
driving  at,  and  these  fat  people  couldn't. — Oh,  they  have 
their  good  side,  I  know,"  he  conceded.  "That's  more 
than  I'd  have  admitted  twenty  years  ago.  I  was  a  good 
deal  of  a  sore-head  at  thirty.  I  had  a  grudge  that  used  to 
keep  me  awake  nights  against  the  gang  that  has  everything 
brought  to  them  on  a  platter.  I  wanted  them  kicked  out, 
to  give  better  men  a  chance.  But  I've  got  over  that.  I'm 
willing  that  they  should  play  their  game  as  long  as  they'll 
let  me  play  mine.  But  ..." 

His  look  belied  his  words,  Henry  thought.  His  eyes, 
smoldering,  gazed  out  across  the  room.  There  was  food 
for  thought,  for  John  and  his  friends  perhaps,  in  the  look 
of  them.  But  an  instant  later,  they  came  suddenly  into 
focus  and  brightened  with  pleased  recognition. 

"Hello,  Twitch!"  he  called  in  a  voice  that  drew  every 
eye  in  the  room.  "Where  are  you  going?  It's  Franklin 
Twitchell,"  he  explained  to  Henry.  "You  know  him, 
don't  you?" 

8 

The  name  of  this  celebrated  comedian  was,  of  course, 
familiar  to  Henry.  He'd  even  seen  him  in  bygone  years 
upon  the  stage.  But  he'd  have  as  soon  expected  to  meet 
in  person  the  King  of  Hedjaz. 

"Why,  no,"  Henry  began,  but  by  that  time  Twitchell 
was  standing  beside  Greer 's  chair,  and  was  thumping  him 
with  ferocious  good  will  on  the  back. 

"You  damned  old  pirate,"  he  cried,  "why  haven't  you 
been  to  see  my  show?" 

"Shake  hands  with  Henry  Craven,"  Greer  said,  "and 
pull  up  and  sit  down."  He  added,  when  this  was  ac 
complished,  "Why,  Henry  and  I  were  thinking  of  going 
to  see  it  to-night." 

"Have  you  got  your  seats?"  Twitchell  asked,  looking 
a  bit  worried.  "It's  Saturday,  you  know.  They'r* 


THE  PAWN  49 

likely  to  be  sold  out."  He  scribbled  a  word  or  two  on  a 
card,  summoned  a  bus  boy  and  despatched  him  with  it  to 
the  box-office  of  the  theater,  which  happened  to  be  next 
door,  overruling,  with  a  wild  glare  of  the  eye,  Greer's  at 
tempt  to  give  the  boy  money  to  buy  the  seats  with. 

All  this  came  through  a  fog  of  indecision  and  embarrass 
ment  to  Henry,  who  couldn't,  for  the  life  of  him,  make  out 
whether  he  was  the  Henry,  Greer  meant,  or  not.  He'd 
never  met  the  man  before  this  afternoon  and  they  hadn't, 
of  course,  said  a  word  about  going  to  the  theater  together. 
But  mightn't  this  be  just  Greer's  way?  He  could  solve 
the  ambiguity  of  the  situation  by  getting  up  and  saying 
he  must  be  running  along,  but  this  would  seem  a  fright 
fully  rude  thing  to  do  in  case  there  was  no  other  Henry. 
And  wouldn't  the  mere  betrayal  of  his  uncertainty  that 
he  was  meant  be  interpretable  as  a  rebuke  of  Greer's  un 
warranted  familiarity  in  calling  him  by  his  Christian 
name  ? 

To  his  relief,  they  got  off  at  once  upon  a  volume  of 
jocund  reminiscences  which  didn't  demand  his  participa 
tion,  so  he  sat  small  and  concentrated  on  a  little  terribly 
strong  tea  which  remained  in  the  pot.  The  talk  was  amus 
ing,  though,  and  almost  impalpably  it  enveloped  him;  a 
glance,  a  laugh,  a  word  or  two,  a  solemn  appeal  for  his 
arbitrament  of  some  ridiculous  point  of  controversy,  and 
he  found  himself  answering  in  kind, — as  if  he  were  really 
one  of  them. 

It  seemed  to  have  been  agreed  upon  without  a  single 
spoken  word  on  the  subject  that  they  were  to  dine  as  they 
sat,  with  Greer  the  self-elected  host.  He  ordered  an  ex 
cellent  dinner  for  Henry  and  himself;  Twitchell,  it  amaz 
ingly  appeared,  was  a  vegetarian  and  so  chose  for  himself. 
He  was  also  even  more  incredibly  a  total  abstainer  from 
every  form  of  alcohol,  and  this  fact  turned  out  to  have  a 
certain  importance  for  Henry. 

Joe  had  said,  "I  always  celebrate  Sunday  by  drinking 
champagne  Saturday  night,"  and  with  this  explanation 
had  ordered  a  quart  of  a  very  respectable  vintage. 


50  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"Twitch  here,"  he  added,  "doesn't  drink  a  drop,  so  I 
hope  you'll  keep  me  company." 

Henry  took  this  for  sarcasm,  but  the  comedian  con 
firmed  it  with  a  nod.  "And  I  suppose,"  he  remarked, 
"I've  got  as  good  a  reputation  for  a  drunkard  as  any  man 
in  the  United  States. ' ' 

This  myth  hadn  't,  as  it  happened,  reached  Henry,  but  it 
accounted  for  itself  easily  enough.  There  was  something 
disheveled  both  about  the  man 's  looks  and  about  his  speech 
which,  in  connection  with  the  comic  wildness  of  his  eye, 
suggested  the  genial  stage  of  inebriation. 

Henry  did  drink  a  little  at  the  dinner  parties  he  and 
Margaret  went  to;  never  at  home  because  they  couldn't 
afford  it,  and  never  during  the  day  down-town  because 
of  the  bank.  To-night,  though,  if  the  comedian  hadn't 
forestalled  him,  he  probably  would  have  declined  to  drink 
at  all,  from  a  fear  of  committing  himself  to  what  might 
turn  out  to  be  a  debauch.  But  the  fact  that  one  member 
of  the  party  never  began  drinking  guaranteed  his  own  lib 
erty — didn't  it? — to  stop  when  he  pleased.  He  told 
Greer  that  he  liked  champagne  with  his  dinner  very  much. 

So  began  a  golden  hour  for  Henry — a  chain  of  golden 
hours.  The  good  wine  and  the  good  food  played  their 
parts,  but  these  weren't  novelties  in  his  experience.  The 
thing  that  was  new  was  a  strangely  comforting,  glowing, 
exhilarating  sense  of  fellowship.  These  two  strangers — 
as  he  had  always  reckoned  such  matters — had  taken  him 
in.  They  were  friendlier,  somehow,  than  any  of  his 
friends.  Not  by  virtue  of  anything  they  did — for  they 
did  nothing  but  talk  at  ease  while  he,  for  the  most  part, 
listened — but  by  virtue  of  what  they  did  not  do.  They 
did  not,  subtly,  leave  him  out  nor  suddenly  remember 
him  in  a  way  that  showed  they  had  forgotten.  There  was 
no  implication  that  he  was  different  in  any  essential  way 
from  themselves.  Joe  had  said, — this  was  how  Henry 
thought  of  him  by  now, — "Henry  here's  a  musician." 
And  it  had  come  out  that  both  these  men  knew  lots  of  musi 
cians,  some  of  them  famous  ones,  and  that  they  regarded  a 


THE  PAWN  51 

musician  as  a  very  good  sort  of  person  to  be.  An  attitude 
of  apology  was  not  in  the  least  called  for. 

And  then,  half-way  through  the  dinner,  Twitchell  said, 
"I  want  to  hear  some  jungle  stories.  That,"  he  added, 
turning  to  Henry,  "is  what  I  put  up  with  this  old  repro 
bate  for.  You  haven't  heard  them  all,  have  you?" 

"Up  on  the  banks  of  the  Amazon  where  he  ran  naked 
so  long?"  Henry  said  audaciously.  "I've  been  hoping  to 
get  that.  I  haven't  heard  any  of  them." 

"What!"  cried  Twitchell,  scandalized.  "Then  we've 
been  wasting  time.  Crank  up,  Joe,  and  get  started.  Tell 
him  about  the  Inca  girl  and  the  bug  in  the  kite's  eye. — If 
it  isn't  a  kite  it's  some  ether  strange  sort  of  bird,"  he 
went  on  explanatorily  while  Joe  grumbled  protests. 
"And  it's  a  little  bug  in  his  eye  that  makes  him  see  so 
well.  And  if  you  can  kill  him  and  find  the  little  bug  and 
put  it  in  your  eye,  then  you  can  see  as  well  as  the  kite." 

It  took  a  good  deal  of  cranking  to  get  Joe  started,  for 
these  jungle  stories  belonged  in  a  remote  past  and  he  must 
have  had  to  tell  them  countless  times.  And  he  never  did 
get  around  to  the  Inca  girl.  But  they  launched  him  at 
last,  and  from  then  on  until  Twitchell  had  to  leave  for  the 
theater,  Henry  listened  entranced. 

They  weren  't  stories  that  Joe  told,  not,  at  least,  after  he 
got  fairly  into  the  vein — mere  random  memories  of  adven 
tures  as  strange,  as  intrinsically  incredible,  as  any  that 
ever  befell  Marco  Polo.  Here  was  a  man  who  had  turned 
back  the  pages  of  history  ten  thousand  years,  if  one  was 
to  believe  his  statement  that  he  found  people  down  there 
who  were  in  the  stone  age,  people  for  whom  even  the  bow 
and  arrow  had  not  been  invented,  whose  deadly  weapons 
were  a  chunk  of  stone  lashed  to  the  end  of  a  stick  and  a 
poisoned  sliver  of  bamboo  shot  from  a  blow  gun. 

Other  explorers  in  various  parts  of  the  world  had  found 
races  as  primitive  as  this,  but  these  had  come  among  them 
carrying  the  mysterious  equipment  of  civilization:  fire 
arms,  clothing,  tents,  trinkets  for  gifts  and  the  rest  of  it. 
He  had  come  alone,  unarmed  and  literally  naked. 


52  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"How?"  Henry  asked.     "How  could  that  happen?" 

Greer  explained  simply  enough.  He  had  started  up  the 
river — an  unnamed  tributary  of  the  Amazon — with  a  lit 
tle  expedition  of  four  canoes  manned  by  Christian  Indians 
from  the  Jesuit  mission  and  equipped  with  what  supplies 
he  had  been  able  to  pack  over  the  Andes  on  two  mules. 
He  was  searching  for  gold.  There  must  be  gold  some 
where,  for  natives  brought  it  in  occasionally  to  the  mis 
sion  packed  in  quills. 

They  paddled  steadily  up  this  river  for  a  month,  ancj 
then,  supplies  getting  low,  his  Indians  deserted  him  in  the 
night.  His  own  canoe  was  wrecked.  He  got  ashore  in 
his  shirt  and  drawers,  and,  for  a  number  of  days  he  could 
not  compute,  since  before  the  end  of  them  he  was  half 
delirious  with  fever  and  starvation,  he  struggled  for  his 
life  with  that  impenetrable  jungle.  He  had  no  objective, 
no  hope,  but  he  found  one  day  a  trail  and  followed  it,  care 
less  where  it  led.  All  his  clothing  had  been  torn  away  by 
the  savage  spiked  undergrowth  of  the  jungle.  His  feet 
were  a  swollen  mass  of  lacerations  and  imbedded  thorns. 

The  trail  he  followed  ended  in  a  sort  of  house  built  of 
thatch,  but  surprisingly  big,  the  home  evidently  of  a  whole 
community.  A  curtain  of  thatch  over  the  gable  end  of  it 
hung  to  the  ground.  He  pulled  the  curtain  apart  and 
went  in,  more  than  half  expecting  to  be  transfixed  by  a 
spear  as  he  did  so  and  utterly  indifferent  as  to  whether 
this  happened  or  not.  The  place  was  deserted,  but  there 
were  the  remains  of  fires  in  it,  covered  with  ashes,  and 
there  was  food.  The  tribe  had  gone  away.  "When  they 
came  back,  they  would  no  doubt  kill  him — eat  him  very 
likely.  But  he  had  no  thought  of  trying  to  escape.  He 
ate,  he  slept,  he  extracted  the  thorns  from  his  feet  and 
bound  his  wounds  with  poultices  of  leaves. 

Days  passed,  he  didn't  know  how  many.  He  grew  bet 
ter  and  stronger,  became  able  to  make  little  excursions  out 
of  the  house,  down  to  the  river  where  he  contrived  to 
catch  some  fish. 

One  day,  he  discovered  that  the  house  had  been  visited 


THE  PAWN  53 

in  his  absence,  and  thereafter  whenever  he  came  back  to 
it  he  found  traces  of  some  intervening  occupation.  The 
natives  must  be  watching  him  constantly;  whenever  he 
went  out,  they  came  stealing  in.  That  gave  him  his  idea. 
They  must  think  him  a  god. 

Well  then,  his  best  chance  lay  in  being  one.  A  god  was 
a  being  they  could  not  harm.  If  he  knew  he  was  a  god, 
he'd  know  they  could  not  harm  him.  A  complete  indiffer 
ence  to  danger,  then,  was  prescribed.  He  must,  so  far  as 
appearances  went,  take  no  precautions  whatever.  If  they 
poisoned  his  food,  he  must  eat  it  and  trust  to  luck.  If  any 
weakness  or  illness  came  upon  him,  he  must  disappear 
until  it  was  past.  He  must  always  remain  unaccountable 
to  them. 

His  appearance  helped  a  lot,  his  beard  and  his  white 
hairy  skin.  No  hair  grew  on  their  faces  and  very  little  on 
their  bodies.  But  he  dared  not  rely  completely  upon  that. 
He  must  develop  some  tricks.  He  had  had,  as  a  boy,  some 
rudimentary  sleight  of  hand.  He  practised  it  now. 

He  had  weeks  alone  in  that  big  thatched  house  before 
any  member  of  the  tribe  ventured  into  his  sight.  By  that 
time  he  was  ready  for  them.  He  had  his  line  and  he  kept 
it — remained  a  god,  or  at  all  events  a  supernatural  mas 
ter,  which  came  to  the  same  thing.  He  bluffed  it  out  on 
that  line,  he  said,  with  one  tribe  after  another,  for  nearly 
three  years.  When  he  thought  one  lot  was  finding  him 
out,  he  moved  on  to  another. 

"Three  years!"  said  Twitchell  under  his  breath.  "Good 
God!  Think  of  sitting  in  a  poker  game  as  long  as  that 
with  never  anything  to  draw  to  and  your  life  always  in  the 
pot." 

It  was  a  terrific  idea. 

"But  I  want  to  know,"  said  Henry,  "what  happened 
that  first  day,  ,the  day  that  first  tribe  came  back. ' ' 

Joe  laughed  grimly  at  the  recollection.  "Why,  they  got 
quite  bold,"  he  said,  "when  they  found  they  didn't  fall 
dead  when  I  looked  at  them.  Some  of  the  young  men  came 
crowding  up  and  one  of  them  made  a  pass  at  me  with 


his  spear.  I  had  a  flat  white  pebble  about  the  diameter 
of  a  quarter  palmed  in  my  hand.  I  walked  up  to  him  and 
seemed  to  take  it  out  of  his  mouth.  Then  I  swallowed  it 
myself. ' ' 

' '  You  mean  you  really  swallowed  it  ? "  both  men  asked  at 
once. 

' '  Hell !  I  had  to, ' '  Greer  said.  ' '  I  hadn  't  any  pockets 
to  disappear  it  in.  It  went  down  damned  hard,  too,  be 
cause  my  mouth  was  pretty  dry.  But  you  should  have 
seen  their  faces!  The  man  was  shaking  all  over,  like  an 
ague.  I  took  his  spear  out  of  his  hand,  planted  it  in  the 
middle  of  the  fire  and  burnt  it.  That  man  was  dead.  I  'd 
eaten  his  soul.  He  went  out  into  the  jungle  and  did  die, 
for  a  fact.  Partly  of  starvation,  I  suppose,  but  partly  of 
clear  fright. 

' '  Oh,  it  was  easy  enough  in  a  way, ' '  he  added  musingly. 
"The  danger  was  that  I'd  get  to  thinking  it  was  too  easy 
and  go  off  guard.  The  medicine  men  all  hated  me,  of 
course;  never  quit  trying  to  show  me  up.  But  my  dope 
was  always  better  than  theirs.  I  could  make  better  poison 
for  darts  than  they  could,  and  so  on.  I  got  on  all  right. 
Had  a  pretty  good  time,  in  a  way. ' ' 

It  was  plain  that  he  meant  it.  His  robust  sense  of  humor 
had  found  much  to  feed  upon.  Even  the  grimmest  of  his 
adventures  had  their  farcical  side.  And  there  were  others 
that  weren't  grim  at  all;  just  pure  breathless  wonder. 

"When  Twitchell,  after  three  or  four  scowls  at  his  watch, 
got  up  to  go  to  work,  he  laid  a  reverent  hand  on  Joe's 
shoulder. 

"I  always  realize  the  next  morning,"  he  said  to  Henry, 
"that  this  man  must  be  a  liar.  But,  boy,  what  a  liar! 
Come  back  and  see  me  after  the  show,  both  of  you." 

"Sure,"  said  Greer.  Evidently,  it  didn't  matter  a  bit 
to  him  whether  they  thought  him  a  liar  or  not. 

."Did  you  ever  find  any  gold?"  Henry  asked,  when 
Twitchell  had  gone. 

Greer  shook  his  head.  "It's  there,  though.  If  a  man 
went  at  it  the  right  way,  he  could  get  it.  But  not  for  me. 


THE  PAWN  55 

It  would  take  the  better  part  of  a  man's  life  to  get  to 
gether  a  serious  amount  of  it,  and  what 's  the  good  of  gold 
if  you've  nothing  to  spend  it  on?  What  a  man  might  do, 
though, — I've  thought  of  this  sometimes — is  to  go  down 
there  with  the  right  sort  of  backing  and  equipment  and 
make  himself  emperor  of  that  country.  A  real  old-fash 
ioned  emperor,  half-god,  like  Cyrus  and  Alexander  and 
those  old  blokes.  Just  think  what  Alexander  could  have 
done  with  modern  science  to  help  him  out — wireless  teleg 
raphy,  a  couple  of  aeroplanes,  a  dozen  men — he  wouldn't 
want  more  than  that — a  dozen  apostles  as  it  were,  who'd 
play  the  game  for  him.  A  half-god!  Why,  he  could  be 
the  most  powerful  god  that  was  ever  worshipped.  But  I 
didn't  have  enough  to  go  on.  I  was  never  more  than  three 
jumps  ahead  of  a  stone-headed  club.  No,  I  didn't  get 
any  gold.  All  I'came  out  of  the  jungle  with,  that  had  any 
cash  value,  was  nine  heads.  I  sold  them  to  a  museum  for 
twenty-seven  hundred  dollars." 

"What  kind  of  heads?"  Henry  wanted  to  know. 

"Human  heads,"  Greer  told  him  simply.  "Reduced 
in  size ;  no  bigger  than  baseballs,  but  in  perfect  proportion, 
so  that  they  might  have  been  little  portrait  busts  of  the 
men  whose  shoulders  they  were  taken  from.  I  watched 
the  whole  process.  I  suppose  I'm  the  only  white  man  in 
the  world  who  knows  hoAv  that  trick  is  done.  Come  along. 
Those  are  box  seats  Twitch  got  for  us,  and  unless  we  can 
sit  up  at  the  rail  we  shan't  see  a  thing." 


The  sort  of  show  that  Henry  supposed  this  to  be  had 
never  amused  him  very  much,  whereas  he'd  gladly  have 
spent  another  couple  of  hours  listening  to  Joe's  talk.  He 
refrained  even  from  hinting  at  this  as  a  feasible  alterna 
tive,  however,  since  it  wouldn't  do  to  disappoint  "Old 
Twitch"  of  their  presence — after  he'd  been  so  kind  as  to 
give  them  box  seats. 

And  the  show  most  agreeably  outran  his  tepid  expecta 
tions.  He  thought  he'd  never  attended  an  entertainment 


56  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

which  ran  so  brightly  and  swiftly,  nor  one  which  boasted 
so  many  excruciatingly  comic  moments.  He  didn't  be 
lieve  he'd^ver  laughed  so  hard  in  his  life.  ^Toe  enjoyed 
it  all  as  much  as  he  did,  roaring  with  laughter  half  the 
time  (like  one  of  these  great  monitor  lizards  he  had  been 
telling  about — or  was  it  some  other  strange  Amazonian 
reptile?)  until  many  an  eye  in  the  audience  was  turned  to 
look, 

Henry's  pleasure  was  spiced,  too,  with  a  new  ingre 
dient.  From  the  very  beginning,  Twitch  had  been  slanting 
jokes  in  their  direction,  saying  things  that  were  meant  for 
them.  He  made  use,  for  instance,  of  the  phrase,  "In  a 
kite's  eye!"  as  an  expression  of  incredulity;  the  whole 
audience  laughed  over  it,  but  he  and  Joe  were  the  only 
ones  who  got  its  full  implication.  It  gave  him  a  queer 
glow  of  pleasure  to  be  a  real  insider,  like  that.  They 
must  be  rather  conspicuous,  he  supposed,  sitting  up  in  a 
box,  and  there  were  at  least  two  people  in  the  audience 
he  knew:  Bob  Corbett  and  his  wife. — But  there  couldn't 
be  any  real  harm  in  that,  could  there? 

He  made  another  discovery,  however,  as  the  evening 
wore  on,  which  he  found  rather  alarming.  Twitch  was 
not  the  only  friend  Joe  could  boast  in  the  company ;  there 
were  two  young  women,  both  minor  principals,  who  must 
know  him,  it  seemed  rather  well.  One  of  them  had  a 
couple  of  songs  which  she  sang  in  a  pleasant,  throaty, 
mezzo  voice,  and  the  other  was  a  French  girl  whose  duty 
it  was  on  two  or  three  occasions  to  stupefy  Twitch  by  the 
rapidity  with  which  she  spoke  in  her  native  tongue.  Both 
of  them  played  unmistakably  at  Joe,  instantly  following 
Twitchell's  lead  when  he  gave  it  and  launching  occasional 
shafts  independently. 

The  French  girl  was  distinctly  attractive  to  Henry.  He  'd 
had  a  good  part  of  his  schooling  in  Geneva,  and  there  had 
been  a  time  when  he  talked  French  almost  as  easily  as 
English.  It  was  an  accomplishment  which  had  rusted 
with  disuse,  but  his  ear  was  as  good  as  ever,  and  he  recog 
nized  her  speech  as  well-bred.  Also,  he  took  a  satisfaction 


THE  PAWN  57 

in  reflecting  that  there  weren't,  in  any  probability,  three 
people  in  the  audience,  and  quite  possibly  not  one  be 
sides  himself,  who  understood  all  she  was  saying. 

Henry  remembered  Twitchell's  invitation  to  come  back 
on  the  stage  after  the  performance,  and  Joe's  offhand  ac 
ceptance  of  it.  It  hadn't  especially  perturbed  him  at  the 
time,  but  the  prospect  which  grew  clearer  as  the  show 
went  on,  that  these  two  young  women  were  to  be  added 
to  their  party  was  most  alarming.  It  suggested  possibil 
ities  which  Henry  simply  dared  not  think  about. 

The  thing  came  to  a  most  dreadful  climax  at  the  end  of 
the  performance.  The  company  were  taking  their  first 
curtain  when  Twitch,  with  that  glaring  grin  of  his,  clipped 
these  two  girls  around  the  waist  and  dragged  them  laugh 
ing  straight  down  toward  Joe  and  Henry,  already  upon 
their  feet  as  most  of  the  audience  were.  He  said  some 
thing  which  was  mercifully  lost  in  the  din  of  the  orchestra, 
but  that  gesture  of  his  had  unmistakably  invited  the  two 
men — and  offered  the  girls  as  the  attraction. 

Henry  trembled  with  horror.  He  dared  not  look  to 
ward  the  Kobert  Corbetts,  but  he  was  sure  they  must  have 
seen.  Half  a  dozen  people  in  their  part  of  the  house 
had  laughed  outright.  It  was  seconds  before  he  dared 
trust  himself  to  speak.  Then  in  a  voice  that  he  tried,  in 
vain  he  feared,  to  make  sound  commonplace  and  friendly, 
he  thanked  Joe  for  a  most  delightful  evening  and  asked 
him  also  to  thank  Twitchell  for  him. 

"Why,  you're  going  back  with  me  to  see  him  now,'* 
said  Joe.  "That  was  understood." 

"I'm  sorry,"  Henry  answered,  "but  I  think  I  must  be 
running  along. ' ' 

This  brought  Joe  around,  puzzled,  for  a  square  look  at 
him.  Henry  felt  the  blood  come  pringling  into  his  face. 
Joe  stared  a  moment  and  then,  understanding,  smiled. 

"Hell!"  he  said,  "it  isn't  going  to  be  that  kind  of  a 
party.  I  couldn't  make  a  night  of  it  if  I  wanted  to. 
I  've  got  to  be  at  work  to-morrow  morning  at  seven  o  'clock. 
Come  along.'* 


58  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Contrition  broke  over  Henry  like  a  wave.  There  was 
no  possibility  of  pretending  that  he'd  been  misunder 
stood,  and  he  could  find  no  words  in  which  to  apologize  for 
his  injurious  suspicion.  The  only  way  to  make  amends 
was  to  follow  Joe  back-stage  and,  presently,  into  Twitch- 
ell's  dressing-room  where  the  comedian,  already  in  his  un 
derclothes,  was  wiping  the  grease-paint  off  his  face  upon  a 
towel. 

He  welcomed  them  with  a  dignified  courtesy  which 
made  an  amazing  contrast  with  that  last  outrageous  prank 
of  his  upon  the  stage.  An  armchair  was  placed  for  Henry, 
a  less  ceremonious  seat  indicated  to  Joe,  and  a  Japanese 
dresser,  with  the  manners  of  a  first-class  butler,  passed 
cigarettes  and  lighted  them.  Henry  felt  he  needed  one. 
This  was  a  bewildering  world  he'd  got  into. 

It  was  only  a  few  minutes  before  Joe,  without  explana 
tion,  left  the  room,  and  he  was  gone  quite  a  long  while. 
But  Henry  got  on  very  comfortably  with  the  comedian. 
Joe  was  their  theme,  of  course.  Twitchell  had  never  seen 
such  a  man.  He'd  sit  up  and  talk  and  drink  all  night, 
Twitch  said,  and  then  take  a  bath,  change  his  clothes,  eat 
his  breakfast  and  go  to  work  with  the  milk  wagons,  just 
as  fresh  as  if  he  'd  had  eight  hours '  sleep.  No  wonder  he  'd 
had  experiences.  He  had  had  twice  as  much  time  for 
them  as  anybody  else. 

"A  first-class  chap,"  Twitchell  went  on,  after  having 
touched  fleetingly  upon  some  of  the  adventures  in  ques 
tion,  "a  first-class  chap,  but  with  a  temper  like  a  hyena. 
Did  you  ever  see  it  get  away  from  him?  Well,  you  don't 
want  to.  It  doesn't  happen  very  often,  of  course.  He 
knows  how  dangerous  it  is.  He  says  that's  why  he  ran 
away  from  school  in  the  first  place.  He  choked  a  school 
master  who'd  said  something  unusually  nasty  to  him,  in 
his  own  cravat.  Might  have  killed  the  fellow. — Have  you 
known  him  long?" 

"Not  very,"  said  Henry.  And  then  added,  himself 
surprised  as  it  broke  over  him,  "  As  a  matter  of  fact,  I  met 
him  for  the  first  time  at  three  o'clock  this  afternoon." 


THE  PAWN  59 

Twitchell  laughed.     "That's  like  him,  too,"  he  said. 

When  Joe  returned,  just  about  then,  he  explained  his 
absence  by  saying,  in  a  tone  of  disappointment,  that  the 
girls  had  a  party  on.  They  were  coming  up  to  the  flat, 
however,  for  a  drink  or  so,  since  they  didn't  mind  arriv 
ing  at  their  party  a  little  late,  and  Joe  was  going  to 
send  them  on  in  his  car.  He  and  Twitchell  and  Henry 
would  have  to  carry  on  by  themselves  until  bedtime,  unless 
there  was  some  one  else  Twitchell  could  think  of  to  add  to 
their  company. 

But  Twitchell  was  a  broken  reed.  He  felt  a  cold  coming 
on,  he  said,  and  was  going  nowhere  but  straight  to  bed. 

Again  Henry  was  forestalled.  He'd  meant  to  plead 
some  such  excuse  himself.  His  misgivings  were  once 
more  aroused.  Joe  was  perfectly  capable  of  making  a 
night  of  it,  so  Twitchell  had  just  said,  even  when  he  had  a 
day's  work  to  begin  the  next  morning,  and  to  accompany  a 
pair  of  unknown  young  actresses  to  his  fiat  at  midnight 
seemed  an  adventure  almost  necessarily  disreputable. 
Still,  he  couldn't  repeat  the  other  man's  excuse,  and  he 
was  unable  to  invent  any  other  which  wouldn't  betray  the 
transparent  disbelief  of  Joe's  assertion  that  the  party  was 
going  to  be  respectable.  So  he  concealed  his  misery  as 
well  as  he  could  (wasn't  this,  perhaps,  in  the  line  of  duty, 
since  the  stockholders'  meeting  this  afternoon?),  sub 
mitted  in  due  course  to  an  introduction  to  Bunny  and 
Yvette — their  surnames  were  pronounced  to  him  but  he 
didn  't  hear  them  clearly  and  they  were  never  used  again — 
and  packed  himself  with  them  into  a  closed  car — enormous 
as  to  hood  and  wheel  base  but  designed  for  the  luxurious 
accommodation  of  only  two  passengers — which  they  found 
backed  into  the  alley  beside  the  stage  door. 

Joe's  chauffeur,  Henry  learned  during  the  swift  flight 
to  the  Sheridan  Road  apartment,  never  reported  for  duty 
until  six  o'clock  at  night,  but  was  on  call  from  then  on 
until  daybreak.  Indeed,  the  only  time  when  Joe  felt  the 
need  of  any  sort  of  domestic  service  was  at  night.  He 
worked  all  day. 


60  JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

A  man  servant,  who  seemed  to  take  their  arrival  as  a 
matter  of  course,  held  open  the  door  of  the  flat  for  them 
when  they  came  in.  They  weren't  going  to  want  supper, 
Joe  told  him,  just  sandwiches  and  champagne.  The  girls, 
by  way  of  making  themselves  at  home  as  Joe  urged  them  to 
do,  took  off  their  hats  as  well  as  their  coats.  They  'd  been 
here  before,  Henry  guessed. 

But  there  was  something  in  the  air  which  reassured  him 
almost  at  once  that  he  was  not  in  for  an  orgy.  The  dignity 
of  the  spacious  drawing-room  had  something  to 
do  with  it.  There  was  a  good  piano;  there 
was  a  wall  thickly  hung  with  etchings  which  looked 
as  if  they  would  repay  scrutiny ;  and  over  the  mantel  hung 
a  painting,  a  big  Sorolla  which  warmed  the  room  with  a 
blaze  of  color.  The  furniture  was  well  chosen  and  rather 
sparse.  It  was  a  room,  in  short,  from  which  many  of 
Henry's  friends  could  have  taken  a  lesson. 

There  was  a  little  general  talk,  comfortably  desultory, 
until  after  the  champagne  and  the  sandwiches  had  come 
in.  Presently  Bunny  carried  her  glass  over  to  the  piano. 
Joe  followed  her,  and  together  they  rummaged  in  a  heap 
of  music  which  lay  there.  Yvette  tucked  herself  up  in  an 
attitude  of  comfortable  relaxation  in  a  corner  of  a  big 
sofa,  and  Henry,  rather  timidly,  sat  down  beside  her. 
He'd  have  been  desperately  put  to  it  for  conversation  had 
not  the  wine  and  the  musical  atrocities  Bunny  was  perpe- 
tating  at  the  piano  relieved  him  of  the  necessity  of  keep 
ing  it  up.  Indeed,  duty  didn't  seem,  anywhere,  to  be  in 
volved.  It  was  understood,  all  round,  that  you  did  what 
you  liked. 

He  asked  her,  after  a  while,  what  part  of  France  she 
eame  from.  He'd  guessed,  from  her  speech  on  the  stage, 
that  it  was  the  Touraine.  She  pounced  upon  this  admis 
sion  that  he  possessed  her  language,  and  insisted  that  they 
talk  in  French.  It  was  ravishing  to  her  to  hear  it.  But 
Henry's  French  was  marvelous!  "Why  should  he  attempt 
to  deny?  All  the  more  enchanting  because  of  its  faintly 
foreign  accent.  He  himself  was  delighted  with— and  a 


THE  PAWN  611 

little  incredulous  of — his  o\vn  loquacity.  He  wouldn't 
have  thought  he  could  do  it. 

And  it  was  delicious,  the  way  the  girl  lighted  up  at  it. 
She  became  a  chatterbox; — told  him,  in  torrents  of  talk, 
about  herself.  She'd  had  adventures  almost  as  queer  as 
Joe 's.  She  'd  gone  out  as  a  child  to  live  with  her  sister  whose 
husband  was  a  silk  merchant  in  Beyrut,  Syria,  and  a  few 
years  later  had  gone  half-way  around  the  world  with  them, 
to  Siam.  Her  sister  had  died  out  there.  Her  brother-in- 
law  had  become,  as  she  said,  a  little  difficult,  so  she  had 
joined  the  chorus  of  an  opera  company — a  sort  of  Flying 
Dutchman  of  an  opera  company  which  perpetually  toured 
from  Bombay  to  Yokohama  and  never  came  home.  She'd 
had  enough  of  this  by  the  end  of  a  year  or  so,  and  in 
Manila  had  taken  a  job  as  a  personal  maid  with  an  Ameri 
can  woman  who  was  about  starting  home.  This  engage 
ment  terminated  in  San  Francisco,  and  she'd  gone  to  work 
singing  in  a  cafe.  It  was  here  Twitchell  had  found  her. 

What  a  life !  Yet  after  all  of  it  she  looked  hardly  older 
than  his  little  cousin  Dorothy,  and  a  lot  more  innocent. 
She'd  hovered  over  most  of  the  moral  plague  spots  of  the 
world,  a  bright-winged  butterfly  that  had  in  some  miracu 
lous  way  escaped  destruction.  She  adored  American  men, 
she  said.  She  was  in  a  position  to  appreciate  how  dif 
ferent  they  were  from  the  others. 

In  a  serious,  unsmiling  way,  she  let  Henry  see  that  she 
especially  liked  him.  There  seemed  to  be  no  coquetry 
about  it.  She  made  no  advances  and  invited  none  from 
him.  She  was  infinitely  content  just  to  sit  beside  him  and 
talk  in  her  own  language. 

They  were  interrupted,  at  last,  by  a  summons  from  Joe. 
Bunny,  after  a  quiescent  interval,  was  once  more  pos 
sessed  to  sing  and  her  attempts  to  accompany  herself  were 
more  than  Joe  could  endure.  Henry  must  take  her  place 
at  the  instrument.  He  made  a  perfunctory  protest  that 
he  was  no  pianist,  but  this  being  overruled  he  sat  down 
at  the  keyboard  and  performed  Bunny's  accompaniment 
in  a  manner  which  they  all  seemed  genuinely  to  admire. 


62 

Yvette  seated  herself  beside  him  on  the  bench  and,  as 
there  wasn't  much  room,  held  herself  fast  with  an  arm 
about  his  waist.  Bunny  stood  behind  him,  her  hands  upon 
his  shoulders.  But  these  were  hardly  caresses.  Or,  if 
they  were,  there  was  a  friendly  unconsciousness  about  them 
quite  disarming. 

They  sang  more  songs  all  together,  old  ones — Joan  of 
Arc  and  The  Long,  Long  Trail.  At  last  one  of  the  girls 
looked  at  her  watch,  showed  it  to  the  other,  and  both  ex 
claimed  regretfully  that  they'd  have  to  be  going  to  their 
party.  Their  host  would  be  getting  grumpy  if  they  didn't 
show  up  pretty  soon.  But  even  now  there  seemed  to  be 
no  hurry.  Joe  ordered  his  car  and  opened  another  bottle 
of  champagne  while  the  girls  were  getting  on  their  coats. 

It  was  arranged,  since  Henry  felt  he  must  be  going 
along  too,  that  they  should  drop  him  at  his  apartment  on 
the  way  down-town.  The  champagne  was  drunk,  Joe  was 
candidly  kissed  good  night  by  both  the  girls,  the  butler, 
matter-of-fact  as  ever,  ran  them  down  in  the  elevator  and 
accompanied  them  to  the  car  with  instructions  for  the 
chauffeur. 

Bunny  got  in  first,  then  Yvette,  then  Henry.  And  as 
he  took  his  seat  in  the  corner  he  felt  a  friendly  little  hand 
slip  into  his. 

"You  must  be  a  wiz  with  the  violin  if  you  can  play  it 
better  than  you  can  the  piano,"  Bunny  said,  as  they  sped 
through  the  park.  "You  ought  to  bring  it  up  to  Joe's 
some  night  and  we'll  have  a  real  party." 

Yvette,  leaning  contentedly  against  his  shoulder,  said 
nothing  all  the  way. 

10 

His  conscience  dealt  him  a  frightful  thrust  when  he 
found  Margaret  sitting  up  for  him.  She  was  reclining 
in  the  sitting-room  easy  chair,  wrapped  in  a  bathrobe,  a 
reading  lamp  at  her  shoulder  and  a  novel  in  her  lap.  She 
yawned  though,  in  a  reasonably  convincing  way  over  his 
exclamations  of  remorse,  asked  him  what  time  it  was  and 
professed  herself  astonished  to  be  told  it  was  nearly  two 


THE  PAWN  63 

o'clock.  It  was  only  when  he  persisted  in  trying  to  ex 
plain  his  omissions  to  telephone  at  the  two  periods  of  the 
evening  when  he  might  have  done  so  that  she  betrayed  a 
flash  of  impatience. 

"Good  heavens,  Henry!"  she  cried.  "I'm  not  your 
wife,  and  I'm  not  the  president  of  the  bank.  You  don't 
owe  any  account  of  yourself  to  me.  I  happened  not  to 
feel  sleepy,  that  was  all,  when  I  came  home  from  Violet's, 
so  I  sat  down  to  read  for  a  while.  I  didn't  know  it  had 
got  so  late." 

The  clock  on  the  mantel  shelf  would  have  told  her, 
though,  if  she  'd  glanced  at  it,  and  it  struck  the  hours,  too, 
rather  aggressively.  He  glanced  toward  her  book  but  she 
had  both  hands  over  it. 

"What's  Greer  like?"  she  asked  in  a  friendlier  tone. 
"Do  you  hate  him  as  much  as  you  thought  you  would?" 

"I'm  not  sure,"  he  said,  "that  I  know  just  what  to  make 
of  him." 

Margaret  stirred  slightly  in  her  chair,  and  it  came  over 
him  that  his  attempt  to  speak  in  a  detached,  judicial  man 
ner  had  been  a  little  overdone.  His  hand  strayed  over  the 
table  to  the  silver  box  where  they  kept  the  cigarettes,  but 
his  sister's  eye  followed  the  gesture,  and,  with  a  little 
laugh  which  sounded  foolish  to  him,  he  relinquished  his 
intention.  "I've  already  smoked  a  good  deal  for  me,  this 
evening,"  he  said. 

Then  he  pulled  himself  together  and  began  on  Greer. 
"Why,  we've  been  together  every  minute  of  the  time  since 
the  meeting  broke  up  this  afternoon.  He  came  up  and 
suggested  that  we'd  better  begin  to  get  acquainted — since 
it  was  supposed  to  be  my  job  to  keep  an  eye  on  him.  He 
said  that  in  so  many  words;  not  in  an  ugly  way  at  all, 
but  as  if  it  was  a  perfectly  natural  thing  for  John  to  have 
done.  So  we  talked  till  dinner  time.  And  then  Frank 
lin  Twitchell — the  actor,  you  know — came  in,  had  dinner 
with  us  and  invited  us  to  his  show.  And,  being  an  old 
friend  of  his,  Twitchell  got  him  talking  about  his  jungle 
adventures.  You  never  heard  such  stories  in  your  life. ' ' 


64          JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

It  began  to  seem  to  him  that  he  was  talking  a  great  deal 
and  rather  fast,  and  that  the  sustaining  interruptions  he 
might  have  accepted  from  Margaret  weren't  coming.  Was 
it  possible  that  she  suspected  him  of  being  intoxicated? 
"Was  he  indeed  acting  quite  like  his  normal  self?  It  was 
an  appalling  doubt.  He  was  sure  he  hadn't  taken  enough 
champagne  to  affect  him  in  the  least,  but  he  had  brought 
a  sort  of  glow  in  with  him  from  that  ride  home  in  Joe's 
car,  which,  innocent  though  it  was,  he  could  hardly  under 
take  to  explain  to  his  sister. 

After  a  pause,  during  which,  after  all,  he  lighted  a  cig 
arette,  she  asked  him  in  a  tone  of  good-humored  indif 
ference  how  he  liked  the  show.  It  was  very  good  of  its 
kind,  he  told  her. 

He  hated  himself  for  the  affected  primness  of  his  tone. 
He'd  have  liked  to  turn  loose  and  tell  her  all  about  it; 
let  her  see  how  jolly  it  had  been  and  what  a  corking  time 
he'd  had.  But  the  freezing  spell  of  self-consciousness 
which  had  settled  upon  him  was  too  strong  to  break. 

"And  did  you  go  on  to  one  of  Mr.  Greer's  terrific  par 
ties  afterwards?"  she  asked. 

There  was  no  note  of  overt  reproach  in  the  question. 
Indeed,  she  had  faintly  smiled  over  it.  But  to  his  horror 
he  found  himself,  as  he  answered,  lying — to  Margaret! 
By  implication,  if  not  categorically. 

"Why,  he  asked  Mr.  Twitchell  and  some  of  the  other 
people  hi  the  company  to  come  up  to  his  apartment  for  a 
little  while  after  the  performance.  He  wanted  me  to 
come  too,  and  I  couldn  't  get  out  of  it  very  well,  so  I  went 
along  with  them.  But  it  wasn't  'terrific'  in  the  least. 
We  had  some  sandwiches  and  champagne,  and  they  sang 
a  little — old  songs  mostly.  It  was  as  innocent  as — Aunt 
Dinah's  quilting  party." 

Margaret  got  up  deliberately  from  her  chair  and 
switched  out  the  reading  lamp.  "And  have  you  just 
been  '  seeing  Nellie  home '  ? "  she  asked. 

He  rose  too.  "We  all  came  away  together,"  he  said 
stiffly;  "in  Greer's  car.  The  rest  of  them  were  going 


THE  PAWN  65 

on  to  another  party — a  dance,  I  believe.  But  they 
squeezed  me  in  and  dropped  me  here." 

Margaret  yawned  behind  her  fingers.  ''I  suppose," 
she  remarked,  as  she  moved  toward  the  door,  "that  the 
decent  thing  to  do  would  be  to  ask  him  here  to  dinner." 

"Greer?"  Henry  asked  incredulously. 

"Yes,"  she  said.  "Why  not?  Isn't  he  the  sort  of 
person  who  could  be  asked  to  dinner?" 

"Why,  yes,  of  course,"  said  Henry.  "Yes,  indeed.  I 
think  it  would  be  a  very  nice  thing  to  do.  I  am  very  glad 
you  thought  of  it." 


CHAPTER  TWO 

THE  BETTER   HALF 


MANY  persons  less  given  to  analysis  than  Henry  Craven 
had  speculated,  during  the  past  half-dozen  years  about  the 
relation  between  Joe  Greer  and  Jennie  MacArthur.  They 
saw,  just  as  Henry  did,  that  it  differed  somehow  from  the 
accepted  standard  for  important,  busy  employers  and 
their  efficient,  infallible  secretaries. 

Jennie,  herself,  would  have  found  it  hard  to  explain 
where  the  difference  lay.  It  may  be  added  that  it  never 
would  have  occurred  to  her  to  try.  She  belonged,  tem 
peramentally,  to  the  adventurer  class  just  as  truly  as  Joe 
himself  belonged  to  it.  From  her  earliest  years,  chance 
had  favored  this  development,  but  no  conceivable  circum 
stances  could  have  made  her  a  conscript.  Life  had  never 
frightened  her.  She  asked  no  better  than  to  explore  it 
on  her  own  responsibility ;  accepted  its  challenges ;  played 
out  its  reasonable  hazards; — an  attitude  more  masculine 
than  feminine,  though  there  was  nothing  seriously  abnor 
mal  about  her. 

When  her  first  big  chance  came — this  was  back  in  nine 
teen  twelve — she  had  been  waiting  for  it  like  a  cat  watch 
ing  a  mouse-hole.  She'd  known  that  that  nervous,  head- 
achey  Miss  Holt,  smart  as  she  was,  couldn't  last  in  the 
chief's  private  office  very  long.  And  when  one  day  Miss 
Holt  came  out  of  the  inner  office  in  tears,  put  on  her  hat 
and  jacket  and  collected  her  belongings  from  the  drawers 
in  her  desk,  and  when  the  "old  devil,"  as  the  girls  called 
him,  came  storming  out  into  the  stenographers'  room  him- 

66 


THE  BETTER  HALF  67 

self  to  pick  out  some  one  to  go  on  with  his  work,  it  wasn't 
all  luck  by  any  means  that  he  picked  Jennie.  She  was 
the  only  one  of  the  lot  who  wasn't  in  the  flutters  over  the 
explosion  of  Miss  Holt. 

Jennie  was  competent  and  she  made  herself  indispen 
sable.  But  that  was  only  the  beginning  of  it.  She  took 
to  Joe  from  the  start.  What  appeared  to  the  other  girls  as 
his  truly  infernal  temper  never  worried  Jennie  a  bit.  She 
perceived  there  was  no  malice  in  it.  He  could  think  harder 
and  faster  than  anybody  else,  and  a  long  succession  of  con 
tacts  with  muddled  minds  or  irresolute  wills  drove  him 
every  now  and  then  frantic.  Her  method  with  him  was  to 
let  him  rave  until  he  got  the  worst  of  it  out  of  his  system, 
and  then  grin  at  him.  She  learned  the  trick  of  toning 
down  his  letters  without  making  them  sound  tame  and 
colorless,  and  before  she'd  worked  for  him  a  year,  he'd 
given  up  dictating  altogether.  ' '  Tell  So-and-So  to  keep  his 
shirt  on,"  he  would  say.  "I  know  what  he  wants  better 
than  he  does  and  when  I  get  around  to  it  I'll  tell  him." 
Jennie  would  write  an  eight-line  letter  to  that  precise 
effect,  but  in  a  totally  different  vein,  and  Joe  with  a  fero 
cious  smile,  would  sign  it. 

"You're  the  only  stenographer  in  the  world,"  he  said 
to  her,  apropos  of  some  such  performance  as  this.  "Go 
to  the  bookkeeper  and  tell  him  your  salary  is  fifty  dollars 
a  week.  Any  time  you  think  that  isn't  enough,  say  so, 
but  don't  you  dare  leave  me  on  any  account.  You  be 
long  to  me,  see?"  He  added,  "You're  not  thinking  of  go 
ing  off  and  getting  married,  are  you?" 

When  she  told  him  she  wasn't,  he  gave  a  sort  of  satisfied 
grunt  which  carried  with  it  the  implication  that  she'd 
better  not  try. 

He  worked  her  mercilessly  when  the  need  was  and  often 
unconsciously  he  imposed  long  hours  upon  her  by  keeping 
her  idle  in  his  more  relaxed  moods  while  he  told  her 
stories.  When  he  found  that  she  was  investing  her  sav 
ings  in  various  highly  speculative  and  adventurous  ways, 
he  gave  her  tips  and  sometimes  took  her  in  with  him  on 


68  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

flyers  of  his  own.  When  he  formed  his  company  for  the 
manufacture  of  aeroplane  parts,  he  made  her  secretary  of 
it  and  fixed  her  salary  at  six  thousand  a  year.  In  every 
ramification  of  his  business  interests,  he  gave  her  his 
whole  confidence,  which  was  something  no  one  else,  she  was 
sure,  shared  with  her,  for  he  was  naturally  suspicious  and 
secretive. 

During  the  whole  seven  years,  from  the  day  when  she'd 
first  gone  into  his  private  office  to  the  day  of  the  direct 
ors '  meeting  that  Henry  Craven  attended,  she  had  never 
considered  leaving  Joe.  She'd  spoiled  him.  She'd  en 
dured  much.  She  had  occasionally  flared  up  to  match 
the  red  of  her  hair  and  driven  some  rebuking  home  truths 
into  him.  But,  on  the  whole,  she'd  enjoyed  herself  enor 
mously.  There  was  a  zest  about  the  whole  thing  that 
made  it  more  than  a  mere  job ;  a  sparkle  of  variety,  and  a 
spice,  too,  of  danger. 

Jennie  was  sophisticated  enough  to  perceive  that  the 
fact  of  Joe's  being  a  man  and  her  being  a  woman  was 
somehow  a  vital  element  in  the  relation.  She  wouldn't 
have  endured  in  a  woman  many  of  Joe's  outstanding 
characteristics,  and  she  knew  well  enough  that,  had  she 
been  a  man,  Joe  never  would  have  taken  her  into  his  con 
fidence  as  he  had  done;  would  probably  have  disliked  and 
suspected  her.  Logically,  then,  it  was  a  sex  attraction 
that  held  them  together,  no  matter  how  little  it  looked 
like  it. 

She  had  been  wary  of  this  danger,  just  at  first,  for  even 
without  the  gossip  of  the  office  she  would  have  known  that 
he  was  a  libertine.  But  she  soon  found  that  he  was  not 
given  to  playing  the  fatherly  game  as  some  of  her  earlier 
and  more  respectable  employers  had  attempted  to  do.  He 
never  indulged  in  any  of  these  petty,  pilfering  caresses, 
falsely  unconscious  but  too  small  to  make  a  fuss  about,  by 
which  many  a  girl  shut  up  in  a  private  office  with  an 
older  man  is  plagued.  Having  no  moral  pretenses  to  sus 
tain — this  was  how  she  worked  it  out — he  felt  no  need  to 
deceive  himself.  His  amorous  impulses  dealt  with  for 


69 

what  they  were,  the  rest  of  him  was  somehow  released. 
Outside  their  avowed  domain,  he  was  cleaner-minded, 
she  thought,  than  any  Puritan  was  likely  to  be.  It  was 
in  the  light  of  her  own  sophistication  that  she  was  able  to 
understand  this. 

Jennie,  herself,  had  learned  without  any  heartbreaking 
or  otherwise  lamentable  consequences,  that  love  was  not, 
for  her,  anyhow,  the  transfiguring,  all  embracing,  indis 
pensable  thing  which  its  propagandists,  the  story-writers, 
would  have  her  believe.  To  any  one  coming  to  the  experi 
ence  with  the  high  romantic  hopes,  the  expectation  of  a 
miracle,  so  sedulously  fostered  in  the  minds  of  brides  and 
such,  it  must  often  be,  she  felt,  a  shocking  and  even  tragic 
disappointment.  She  didn  't  see  why  people  insisted  on  ly 
ing  about  a  thing  like  that. 

She  wasn't  sure  she  wouldn't  marry  sometime. 
She  would  if  she  found  the  right  man  and  it 
seemed  the  sensible  thing  to  do.  The  essential  lesson  of 
her  experience  was  that  love  was  a  commensurable  thing 
with  other  serious  facts  of  life.  It  was  possible  to  pay 
too  high  a  price  for  it.  A  life  without  it  might  be  a  bet 
ter  thing  than  one  in  which  it  was  unsuccessfully  mixed. 

Its  mixture  in  her  relation  with  Joe  would  be  ruinous, 
she  felt  sure,  no  matter  what  form  it  took.  The  attraction 
between  them  was,  then,  a  genuine  danger,  but,  being  wise 
enough  to  recognize  its  existence,  knowing  that  this  reef 
was  there,  she  had  been  able  for  seven  years  to  steer  a  suc 
cessful  course  where  a  less  open-eyed  pilot  might  easily 
have  suffered  shipwreck. 

It  was  facts,  however,  rather  than  appearances  that 
she  had  to  look  out  for.  As  regarded  the  latter,  she  could 
afford  a  superb  indifference.  She  was  a  magnificently 
independent  person,  in  that  there  was  no  one  in  the  world 
whose  moral  disapproval  could  affect  adversely  her  eco 
nomic  status.  She'd  gone  with  Joe  on  many  a  business 
trip  to  Washington,  New  York  and  elsewhere,  and  the 
Grundy  aspect  of  such  an  adventure,  or  of  her  going  to 
dine  alone  with  him  in  his  flat,  never  disturbed  her  in  the 


70  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

least.  A  smile  like  the  one  which  had  so  exercised  the 
speculative  faculties  of  Henry  Craven  at  the  board  meet 
ing  was  the  only  tribute  that  she  ever  paid  to  the  Moloch 
of  propriety. 

Joe  invited  her  to  such  a  dinner  one  night  in  May  about 
a  month  after  the  directors'  meeting,  and  within  a  few 
days  after  his  return  from  a  trip  to  the  Northwest  where 
he'd  been  engaged  in  settling  the  last  details  and  letting 
the  contracts  for  the  construction  of  their  flax  factories. 

Invitations  of  this  sort  weren't  so  very  frequent,  and 
they  generally  had  a  real  occasion.  (The  two  of  them 
dined  together  impromptu  often  at  some  down-town  res 
taurant  as  a  mere  conclusion  of  or  interruption  in  a  long 
day's  work.)  She'd  been  aware  of  something  on  his  mind 
ever  since  his  return,  and  from  her  first  assumption  that 
it  was  something  connected  with  company  affairs  she'd 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  it  was  not,  or,  at  least,  not 
altogether.  His  invitation  to  dinner  explicitly  confirmed 
her  guess.  He  had  something  he  wanted  to  talk  with  her 
about,  he  said.  "Oh,  it's  got  nothing  to  do  with  any  of 
this."  He  smiled  as  he  added  on  leaving  her,  "I'm  going 
to  surprise  you,  Jennie." 

"Well,  there  was  that  about  him.  No  one  could  ever 
know  him  well  enough  to  exhaust  that  capacity  for  sur 
prises.  In  any  close  relation  with  Joe,  you  did  well  to 
remember  this  and  to  steer  your  course  so  that  surprises 
needn't  be  calamitous.  Jennie  didn't  worry  and  she 
wasted  no  time  trying  to  guess. 

A  dinner  at  Joe's  flat,  whatever  its  occasion,  deserved 
to  be  treated  as  a  party,  so  she  went  home  a  little  early  that 
night  from  the  office — there  wasn't  so  very  much  to  do 
these  days — and  dressed  in  a  leisurely  and  luxurious  man 
ner  in  a  jade  satin  frock  which  she  had  bought,  luckily, 
only  the  week  before.  Jennie  frankly  enjoyed  dressing  up, 
and  one  of  her  few  grievances  against  the  sort  of  life  she 
led  was  that  it  offered  so  few  opportunities  for  this  indul 
gence. 

The  dinner  was  at  seven-thirty  and  it  was  still  broad 


THE  BETTER  HALF  71 

'daylight  when  she  parked  her  little  coupe  in  the  side- 
street  nearest  Joe's  doorway.  In  the  doorway,  she  found 
Joe's  chauffeur  waiting  under  his  employer's  orders  for 
her  to  drive  up  so  that  he  might  take  her  car  into  the 
garage  and  bring  it  around  again  whenever  she  wanted  it. 

He  was  a  prepossessing  youngster  who  had  taken  this 
job  on  getting  demobilized  from  the  army  a  few  weeks 
previously.  The  irregular  hours  and  the  touch  of  variety 
about  it  made  it,  Jennie  supposed,  less  unattractive  to 
him  than  most  of  the  berths  open  to  a  man  in  his  position. 
But  he  was  too  good,  she  thought,  for  this  sort  of  thing, — 
taking  Joe 's  actresses  on  joy-rides  in  the  small  hours  of  the 
morning  and  so  on;  and  she  made  a  mental  note,  as  she 
spoke  to  him,  of  a  resolution  to  persuade  Joe  to  find  some 
thing  better  for  him  to  do.  His  name  was  George  Burns. 

She  told  him  her  car  was  all  right  where  it  was,  and 
that  when  she  was  ready  to  go  she  wouldn't  mind  going 
out  to  it  alone,  so  if  this  was  to  have  been  his  only  duty 
for  the  evening  he  might  as  well  consider  himself  at  lib 
erty.  He  thanked  her,  but  she  guessed  from  his  manner 
that  he  didn't  intend  to  act  upon  her  permission.  In  the 
same  moment  she  realized,  and  she  blushed  a  bright  pink 
as  it  broke  over  her,  that  the  boy  was  shocked.  That  he 
attributed — it  must  be  that — a  sinister  interpretation  to 
her  visit.  Once  or  twice  he'd  driven  her  home  from  the 
office  when  she'd  worked  late  and  they'd  got  to  be  quite 
good  friends.  To-night  he  seemed  to  see  her  in  a  new  and 
rather  lurid  light. 

In  the  elevator,  she  decided  she'd  say  nothing  about 
the  encounter  to  Joe,  at  least  until  she'd  cooled  down 
enough  to  laugh  over  it.  But  he,  meeting  her  in  the  hall 
as  the  butler  opened  the  door  for  her,  had  it  all  out  of  her 
in  two  minutes. 

"Good  lord,  Jennie!  What's  the  matter  with  you?" 
he  asked  at  sight  of  her. 

And  to  her  "Well,  what  is?"  he  answered,  "You  look 
— as  if  you'd  just  been  kissed  by  a  traveling  man." 

At  that,  she  laughed  and  told  him. 


72  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

''That's  a  nice  mess,"  he  commented  with  a  grin.  "Here, 
give  me  your  keys.  And  go  and  take  off  your  cloak.  You 
know  the  room,  don't  you?  I'll  be  back  in  a  minute.  No, 
I  don't  blame  him  a  bit.  It's  all  your  fault." 

He  had,  it  struck  her,  a  rather  thoughtful  air,  when  he 
joined  her  a  few  minutes  later  in  the  drawing-room.  He 
stood  for  a  moment  a  little  way  off,  candidly  regarding 
her  before  he  spoke. 

"You  wear  better-looking  clothes  than  most  of  the 
women  who  have  nothing  to  do  but  buy  them.  How  do 
you  manage  it,  Jennie?" 

She  felt  that  her  new  frock  was  vindicated,  for  it  wasn't 
often  he  showed  the  slightest  consciousness  of  what  she 
wore.  ' '  I  happen  to  be  the  right  size  to  wear  models, ' '  she 
said.  ' '  That 's  the  answer.  It  saves  a  lot  of  trouble. ' ' 

"The  right  size  and  the  right  shape,"  he  amended. 
"It's  more  than  your  clothes  that  looks  good  to  me." 

There  was  the  same  quality,  oddly  reflective  for  him, 
about  his  gesture,  for  as  he  finished  speaking  he  came  up 
and  took  her  by  both  bare  arms  just  above  the  elbow, 
gently  enough,  as  if  he  merely  meant  to  hold  her  there 
until  the  end  of  his  train  of  thought. 

She  was  perfectly  comfortable,  in  his  hands  like  that, 
but  it  struck  her — perhaps  because  of  her  recent  encoun 
ter  with  George  Burns — as  rather  funny  that  this  should 
be  true.  They  were  great  powerful  hairy  hands  that  held 
her,  and  the  face,  so  near  hers,  could  take  on,  easily  enough, 
a  feral  look.  She  allowed  herself  to  smile  over  her  own 
complacence. 

"With  a  grunt,  he  released  her  and  stepped  away.  "You 
don't  mind  me  a  bit,  do  you?"  he  remarked.  "And  you 
know  me  pretty  well,  too,  wouldn't  you  say?" 

"Pretty  well — as  far  as  I  go,"  she  qualified.  "No,  I 
didn't  mind.  I  know  you  play  fair." 

' '  And  it 's — how  many  years  ? "  he  asked. 

"That  we've  known  each  other?  Seven,  about."  She 
laughed.  "You  sound  as  if  you  were  going  to  ask  me  to 
give  you  a  'character'  to  somebody." 


THE  BETTER  HALF  73 

He  shot  a  look  at  her  so  startled  and  penetrating,  that 
she  wondered  if,  in  some  preposterous  way,  her  joke  had 
come  near  the  mark.  But  he  heard  the  butler  coming  in 
with  cocktails  just  then,  and  broke  off  to  ask  her  what 
wine  she'd  have  with  her  dinner. 

' '  Why,  if  it 's  anything  hard  you  want  me  to  do  to-night, 
you'd  better  not  give  me  any,"  she  told  him.  "Whereupon, 
he  swore  and  asked  her  what  she  meant;  he'd  asked  her 
here  for  a  party,  hadn't  he? 

"For  a  surprise,  I  thought,"  she  argued.  "And  I  had 
a  hunch  it  had  probably  been  a  surprise  for  you,  too,  and 
that  you'd  be  wanting  some  good  advice.  If  you  do,  and 
it's  important,  this  cocktail  will  be  plenty." 

"Ice  a  pint  of  champagne  for  Miss  MacArthur,  An- 
son, "  Joe  growled  to  the  butler.  "She'll  never  drink  more 
than  that,  so  there's  no  use  wasting  it.  Bourbon  for  me. 

"I'm  the  last  man  to  complain  of  anybody  following  a 
hunch,"  he  said  when  they  had  sat  down  to  dinner.  She 
perceived  from  his  conversational  tone  that  she  was  to  be 
made  to  wait  for  the  springing  of  the  surprise.  "I've 
saved  my  life  that  way  more  times  than  I  can  count.  But 
sometimes  you  get  a  hunch  that  doesn  't  lead  you  anywhere. 
I  had  one  like  that  out  on  this  last  trip.  I  kept  getting 
the  idea  wherever  I  went  that  somebody  in  the  crowd  I 
was  talking  to  knew  more  than  he  was  supposed  to,  had 
some  sort  of  advance  information  about  our  plans  or 
about  me.  I  couldn't  pin  it  on  to  anybody,  but  it  made 
me  feel  sort  of  jumpy.  I  really  don't  believe  there  was 
anything  in  it." 

She  offered  no  comment  here.  The  faint  nebulous  no 
tion  which  formed  itself  in  the  back  of  her  mind  as  he 
spoke,  that  a  banker  like  John  Williamson  had  a  long 
arm  and  might  have  reached  it  out  in  that  direction,  she 
dismissed,  for  the  present,  largely  because  Joe  went 
straight  on  to  speak  of  something  else,  which  was  clearly 
more  important. 

"There's  one  thing  up  there,  though,  that's  going  to 
make  us  trouble,  as  sure  as  I've  got  a  nose  on  my  face, 


74  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

and  that's  this  damned  Non-partisan  League.  If  those 
hicks  up  there  knew  what  was  good  for  them  they'd  run 
Townley  and  the  rest  of  those  agitators  out  of  the  coun 
try  just  like  anybody  else  who  was  peddling  gold  bricks." 

She  laughed  at  him  openly,  and  he  demanded  fiercely 
to  be  told  what  she  meant  by  it,  although  she  thought  he 
knew. 

' '  Why,  you  're  the  man  with  the  gold  brick,  aren  't  you  ? ' ' 
she  said.  ' '  Anyway,  what  you  want  those  hicks  to  do  is  to 
give  you  their  good  flax  for  just  about  nothing  so  that 
we  can  make  millions  out  of  it  without  doing  hardly  any 
real  work  at  all.  And  the  reason  you'd  like  to  run  Town- 
ley  out  of  the  country  is  because  you're  afraid  he'll  put 
them  wise." 

He  glared  at  her,  and  then,  with  a  grunt  and  a  grin, 
subsided.  ' '  Oh,  I  know  you  like  to  pretend  to  be  a  damned 
red  Bolshevik,  and  you  think  that  some  time  or  other 
you'll  get  a  real  rise  out  of  me.  But  you  won't.  You 
know  as  well  as  I  do  that  those  farmers  would  go  on  burn 
ing  that  good  flax  straw  till  Kingdom  Come,  no  matter  how 
many  bulletins  the  Department  of  Agriculture  sent  out 
saying  it  was  valuable.  They're  neither  one  thing  nor 
the  other,  that 's  the  trouble  with  them.  They  aren 't  will 
ing  to  work,  like  peasants,  and  they  aren't  willing  to 
think,  and  take  the  chance  that  they've  thought  right,  like 
us.  All  they  're  willing  to  do  is  to  make  trouble  for  the  men 
who  do  think.  And  they  '11  make  some  of  it  for  us,  unless  I 
miss  my  guess. — It's  a  funny  thing,  too,"  he  added,  "but 
that  angle  of  the  game  doesn't  worry  Williamson  as  much 
as  it  does  me.  You'd  think  it  would  be  just  the  thing  that 
would  scare  him  worst." 

Jennie  found  nothing  especially  strange  about  that. 
Agitators  never  had  really  worried  the  rich  very  seriously 
in  this  country.  There 'd  been  some  sort  of  radical  move 
ment  going  on  ever  since  she  could  remember,  but  the 
financiers  always  got  their  way  in  the  long  run.  They 
pretended  they  were  going  to  be  ruined  by  this  new  law 
or  that,  and  they  fought  it  through  the  courts  and  all,  but 


THE  BETTER  HALF  75 

when  the  dust  had  settled  you  saw  them  sitting  just  where 
they'd  sat  before,  playing,  with  a  fresh  pack  perhaps,  the 
same  old  game. 

Joe  had  been  enjoying  this,  and  his  breast  of  guinea 
fowl  at  the  same  time,  nodding  every  now  and  then,  in 
grim  acquiescence.  The  rich  roused  his  indignation  as 
easily  as  the  Reds.  But  her  conclusion  made  him  glare 
again. 

"You  want  to  learn  to  take  it  easier,  now  you're  one  of 
them/'  she  said. 

"I'll  never  be  one  of  them!"  he  vehemently  declared. 
"We're  going  along  with  them  just  now,  or  trying  to,  be 
cause  it  happens  to  suit  our  ideas.  But  we're  a  different 
breed  of  cats,  and  don't  you  forget  it,  from  that — stall-fed 
bunch.  That's  what  Henry  calls  'em,  and  he's  got  'em 
right." 

"Henry  Craven?"  she  asked  incredulously.  "Well,  but 
what  does  Henry  call  himself?" 

"A  musician;  and  he's  a  good  one,  too.  He's  all  right, 
that  little  man." 

To  be  sure  he  was ;  Jennie  conceded  this  readily  enough. 
Only,  she  wondered,  what  was  Joe  so  sheepish  about  ?  The 
explanation  came  after  a  hesitant  pause.  "I  went  to 
dinner  with  'em,"  Joe  said.  "Him  and  his  sister,  at 
their  flat,  last  night. — So  I  suppose  you've  got  a  right  to 
say  that  I'm  turning  respectable,"  he  concluded. 

Clearly,  he  was  embarrassed  about  it,  an  amazing  phe 
nomenon  to  be  seen  in  Joe.  Jennie  suppressed  an  impulse 
to  laugh  at  him  and  asked  him,  with  a  good  appearance  of 
sobriety,  if  he'd  had  a  good  time. 

He  told  her,  a  little  dubiously,  that  he  had;  a  first-rate 
time,  it  would  have  been,  except  that  he  didn't  quite — get 
them.  She  wanted  to  know  what  it  was  about  them  that 
he  didn't  get. 

"Why,  I'd  supposed,"  he  said,  "that  they  were  society 
people;  'way  up  in  G.  But  instead  of  that,  they're  very 
plain ;  almost  shabby.  At  least  their  place  is.  They  must 
have  been  starving  Henry  at  the  bank,  and  it  seems  he 


76  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

hasn't  anything  of  his  o\ra.  They've  got  a  good  piano, 
but  it's  new,  I  guess.  Since  the  new  job.  They  had  some 
nice  people  there.  Novelli,  the  pianist,  and  his  wife.  She 
seems  to  be  an  American,  though  he 's  a  Wop.  He  played 
for  us,  and  he's  a  whale  at  it,  I'll  say.  Then  there  was  a 
Miss  "Wollaston.  That  was  all  except  themselves  and  me." 

"Mary  Wollaston?"  Jennie  asked. 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Joe.  "I  didn't  start  calling  any 
of  'em  by  their  first  names." 

' '  A  very  blonde  girl — rather  pretty  ?  I  '11  bet  she  flirted 
with  you  like  mad." 

"Girl  nothing,"  Joe  retorted.  "A  grand  old  girl  of 
seventy,  that's  what  she  was." 

"Oh,  that  would  be  her  aunt  Lucile. — I  know  all  about 
them,"  Jennie  went  on  to  explain,  "because  they've  taken 
up  Sarah  March's  brother.  He's  a  composer,  and  Paula 
Carresford — that's  Doctor  Wollaston 's  wife — is  going  to 
sing  an  opera  of  his  at  Ravinia  this  summer.  Mrs.  No- 
Arelli,"  she  concluded,  "is  Rodney  Aldrich's  sister,  or  his 
wife's,  I  don't  remember  which.  Oh,  you've  been  in  so 
ciety,  Joe,  even  though  you  didn't  know  it." 

' '  You  talk  like  a  society  editor, ' '  he  grumbled.  ' '  Where 
do  you  get  that  stuff?" 

"I  always  read  Madam  X.  Sunday  morning.  Learn  a 
lot  that  way. — Tell  me  about  Henry's  sister.  What's  she 
like?  Is  she  older  than  he  is,  or  younger?" 

"Oh,  younger,"  said  Joe.  "At  least,  I  took  her  to  be. 
Why,  she's  a  higher- voltage  proposition  than  Henry,  a 
good  deal.  Knows  what  she's  about,  all  right.  Not  what 
you'd  expect,  exactly.  Dresses  up  to  the  nines,  shows  a 
good  deal  of  leg,  smokes  cigarettes.  She  seemed  very  good- 
natured  and  agreeable,  except  for  one  nasty  look  she  gave 
Henry  when  he  did  something  she  didn't  like.  She  acted 
friendly  enough  toward  me.  I  suppose  that's  because  no 
one  has  told  her  yet  what  a  devil  I  am." 

The  satirical  observation  that  this  didn't  necessarily 
follow  was  on  Jennie's  lips,  but  she  suppressed  it.  The 
force  of  the  protective  impulse  which  had  sprung  up  in 


THE  BETTER  HALF  77 

her,  surprised  her.  She  saw  the  woman  and  her  motive 
crystal-clear;  hard,  clever,  determined,  domineering — her 
brother's  characteristic  timidity  made  that  plain;  the 
masking  good-humor  belied  by  that  one  nasty  look.  She 
had  cast  her  fly  before  ever  she'd  seen  Joe,  as  soon  as  she 
knew  that  this  big  fish  was  in  the  pool.  A  clever  fly; 
respectability  brightened  by  the  legs  and  the  cigarettes! 
But  weren't  men  the  limit?  How  was  it  possible  that 
Joe,  with  all  his  wariness,  didn't  see?  Yet  he  didn't,  at 
all.  It  was  he  who  broke  the  silence  that  had  settled  be 
tween  them. 

' '  It  was — friendly  of  her  to  ask  me  like  that.  And  it  was 
her  own  idea.  Henry  told  me  that  in  so  many  words. 
Didn't  want  me  to  think,  I  guess,  that  he  was  putting  any 
thing  over  on  her.  And  they  were  all  nice  people.  Nice, 
regular  people."  He  gave  an  embarrassed  little  laugh. 
' '  It  does  look  as  if  I  was  turning  respectable,  doesn  't  it  ? " 

She  managed  some  sort  of  reply  that  satisfied  him.  It 
didn't  matter  since  he  wasn't  listening,  anyway. 
A  moment  later,  he  laughed  again  and  sat  back  in  his  chair. 

' '  Well,  that 's  the  funny  way  life  works, ' '  he  said.  ' '  Just 
as  I'm  getting  ready  to  settle  down  and  behave  myself, 
my  wife's  lawyer  writes  me  to  say  she's  going  to  get  a  di 
vorce.  ' ' 

Jennie  stared  at  him  in  clear  incredulity.  When  she 
could  think  at  all,  she  tried  to  warn  herself  that  this  was 
one  of  his  jokes,  but  it  wouldn't  work.  She  knew  him 
too  well  to  be  deceived.  "Your — wife!"  she  echoed 
blankly. 

' '  Didn  't  I  tell  you  you  were  going  to  be  surprised  ? "  he 
said. 

After  a  silence  of  a  minute,  she  asked,  "How  long  have 
you  been  married,  Joe?" 

' '  Oh,  twenty  years,  about.  Bring  your  coffee  along  into 
the  other  room  where  we  can  be  comfortable.  That's 
what  I  wanted  to  talk  over  to-night.  I  '11  tell  you  all  about 
it." 


78  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

2 

He  won  a  reluctant  smile  from  her  almost  at  once  by  an 
absurd  solicitude  over  the  perfectly  irrelevant  matter  of 
her  comfort.  The  chair  she  liked  best,  placed  with  refer 
ence  to  the  breeze, — cigarettes,  matches,  ash-tray. 

"I'm  not  ninety  years  old,"  she  said  petulantly,  to 
check  his  running  about;  "nor  an  invalid  just  up  from 
an  operation." 

"You're  pretty  mad,  though,"  he  guessed. 

' '  I  don 't  know  whether  I  am  or  not, ' '  she  told  him  truth 
fully.  "I'm  just  wondering  how  well  I  know  you,  after 
all." 

"You  know  me  exactly  as  well  as  you  think  you  do," 
he  asserted.  "Look  here!  Annabel  and  I  were  really 
married — living  together,  I  mean — about  six  months.  I 
haven't  seen  her  in  nineteen  years.  She  lives  out  in  Pasa 
dena  with  her  father;  her  mother  died  a  couple  of  years 
ago.  It  wasn't  up  to  me,  was  it,  to  tell  you  the  day  you 
came  to  work  for  me  that  I  was  a  married  man  not  living 
with  my  wife? 

"Oh,  it's  been  kind  of  a  dirty  deal  all  round.  I  guess 
that's  why  I've  wanted  to  keep  it  dark.  I've  done  a 
whole  lot  worse  things, ' '  he  went  on,  feeling  his  way,  ' '  and 
haven't  cared  a  damn  who  knew  'em.  And  I  never  tried 
to  make  anybody  think  I  was  a  plaster  angel.  But  this 
proposition, — well,  I  never  knew  my  own  mind  about  it. 
I've  always  thought  I  might  clean  it  up  some  day.  Only 
when  I  did,  I  wanted  to  be  in  position  to  do  it  brown,  see, 
the  handsome  thing,  so  there  wouldn't  be  anything  left  to 
be  said. 

"And  I  give  you  my  word,  Jennie,  I  was  getting  ready 
to  do  it.  I  had  it  doped  out  that,  when  this  deal  with 
Williamson  got  settled,  I'd  run  out  to  the  coast  and  see 
'em — see  my  wife,  I  mean, — find  out  what  she  wanted, 
straighten  everything  out.  And  then,  some  days  ago,  a 
smart  Aleck  of  a  lawyer  writes  me  that  she's  going  to  get 
a  divorce.  Of  course,  it's  all  right.  I  let  her  know,  long 
ago,  that  she  was  entitled  to  get  one,  if  she  wanted  it, — 


79 

on  any  grounds  she  chose.  As  long  as  she  didn't,  I  let  it 
ride.  Well,  there  it  is. — Damn  it,  Jennie,  can't  you  see  it 
at  all  ?  You  sit  there  looking  like  .  .  . " 

He  broke  off,  perceiving  that  he'd  aroused  her. 

"Yes,  I  understand,"  she  said,  at  last.  "I  ought  to, 
if  anybody  could.  We're  more  alike  than  you  think,  Joe. 
I  could  surprise  you,  too,  I  guess.  No,  I'm  not  going  to 
tell  you  about  it  now.  This  is  your  party.  Go  ahead  and 
tell  me  the  whole  story.  What  was  she  like?  Where  did 
you  meet  her?" 

"Are  you  married,  too?"  he  asked,  with  an  intent  look 
at  her. 

"No,"  she  said.  And  she  put  such  a  weight  of  mean 
ing  into  the  monosyllable  that  it  stopped  the  inquiry  as 
well  as  answered  it. 

Joe  turned  away  thoughtfully  to  the  smoking  table  and 
relighted  his  cigar. 

"Why,  Annabel  was  a  Chicago  girl,"  he  began  presently. 
"Lived  down  in  Woodlawn  with  her  father  and  mother — 
Fanning  their  name  was.  I  boarded  with  them  back  in 
the  spring  of  'ninety-nine,  just  twenty  years  ago  now. 
I'd  just  passed  my  examination  for  a  licensed  structural 
engineer,  got  my  seal  and  all,  and  I  had  my  first  white- 
collar  job,  down  in  South  Chicago.  But  I  had  to  come 
up  to  town  a  good  deal,  and  Woodlawn  was  convenient — 
half-way  between.  They  were  the  most  respectable  people 
in  the  world,  those  Fannings.  Poor  but  genteel — good 
God, — so  you  could  hardly  breathe!  They  had  put  what 
money  they  had  into  the  building  boom  that  struck  that 
part  of  town  just  before  the  World's  Fair.  They  owned  a 
whole  block  of  brick  veneered  houses,  empty,  most  of  them, 
half  the  time,  and  renting,  when  they  did,  for  just  about 
enough  to  cover  the  repairs.  I  was  the  first  boarder — 
guest  they  called  it — they'd  ever  taken  in,  and  we  never 
spoke  of  money.  I  sealed  it  up  in  an  envelope  every  Mon 
day  morning  and  pinned  it  to  my  pin-cushion. 

"But  you  know,  Jennie,  that  sort  of  thing  looked  good 
to  me  just  about  then.  You  see,  I'm  not  a  real  rough- 


80  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

neck — I  mean,  I  wasn't  born  that  way.  I  can't  remem 
ber  my  mother  much.  She  died  when  I  was  six  or  seven. 
I  think  she  must  have  been  a  pretty  woman  and  well 
brought  up.  But  my  father — God!  I  remember  him. 
He  was  a  schoolmaster,  and  he  had  a  temper  just  like  mine. 
I  can't  think  of  a  more  devilish  combination  than  that. 
He  had  to  hold  it  in,  you  see, — lose  his  job  if  he  didn't, — 
so  it  struck  in  on  him ;  poisoned  him,  you  might  say.  The 
only  person  he  could  take  any  of  it  out  on  was  me.  I 
think  he  must,  have  hated  me.  I  know  I  hated  him.  But 
just  the  same,  if  I  'd  behaved  myself,  if  I  hadn  't  disgraced 
him,  he'd  have  half  starved  himself  to  give  me  a  college 
education  and  make  a  schoolmaster  out  of  me.  He  was 
what  you'd  call  a  gentleman,  all  right.  That's  what  I'm 
getting  at — a  gentleman  and  a  scholar.  There  were  a  lot 
of  good  books  around  the  house,  and  I  read  when  I  could 
without  giving  him  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  I  was  do 
ing  it. 

"I  didn't  run  away,  finally,  until  I  was  sixteen,  and  I 
was  as  old  then  as  most  men  are  at  twenty-five.  I  had  to 
begin  shaving  when  I  was  thirteen,  and  I  was  older  in 
some  ways,  God  knows,  when  I  left  home,  than  Henry 
Craven  will  ever  be. 

"I  suppose  you  might  say  it  was  respectability  I  ran 
away  from.  And  when  I  came  back  to  the  States  from 
Para,  in  'ninety-three,  it  wasn't  respectability  that  I'd 
come  back  for.  Lord!  I  struck  New  York  with  two 
thousand  dollars,  and  I  blew  it  all  in  in  a  week,  mostly  in 
a  poker  game.  Thought  I  was  the  best  poker  player  in 
the  world.  Well,  I  didn't  have  any  trouble  finding  three 
men  who  were  better. 

"I  guess  it  was  lucky  for  me  I  got  cleaned  out.  I 
found  myself,  you  see,  on  the  edge  of  the  gutter.  And 
you  want  to  remember  what  year  that  was — 'ninety-three 
— bank  failures,  bread  lines,  Coxey's  Army.  "Well,  there 
was  one  thing  got  rubbed  into  me  that  year  so  that  I'll 
never  forget  it.  Everybody  was  hard-up,  all  right,  the 
white-collar  people  as  well  as  the  rest.  They  failed  in 


THE  BETTER  HALF  81 

business  and  closed  their  shops,  stood  off  their  creditors 
and  went  through  bankruptcy.  They'd  hock  their  dia 
monds  and  fire  a  couple  of  parlor-maids  and  feel  sorry  as 
hell  for  themselves.  But  it  was  all  in  their  eye,  really. 
They  kept  just  as  warm  and  dry  and  well-fed  as  ever. 
And,  since  the  same  thing  was  happening  to  all  of  them, 
there  was  no  disgrace  about  it.  The  people  who  got  it  in 
the  neck  were  the  artisans.  A  man  might  be  the  most 
skilful  sort  of  cabinet-maker,  but  he  was  up  against  it 
just  as  hard  as  a  Hunkie,  in  bad  times. 

"Other  things  being  equal,  you  know,  I'd  a  whole  lot 
rather  work  at  something  that  required  bodily  skill  than 
sit  at  a  desk  all  day  and  tell  people  what  to  do.  But  that 
year  showed  me  there  was  nothing  in  it.  The  birds  in  the 
swivel-chairs  have  got  the  game  rigged  their  way.  I  hated 
'em.  I  hated  their  pasty  faces  and  their  flabby  hands 
and  their  padded  shoulders.  Sometimes  when  I'd  be 
swinging  a  pick  out  on  a  road,  I'd  see  one  of  'em  go  driv 
ing  by  and  I'd  want  to  take  him  and  muss  him  up.  I'd 
think  what  I'd  do  to  him  if  I  had  him  out  in  the  jungle. 
But  I  knew  I  never  would  get  him  out  in  the  jungle;  I 
never  could  do  anything  to  him  until  I  had  got  to  where 
I  didn't  have  to  do  things  with  my  own  hands.  That's 
why  I  got  me  a  swivel-chair,  see?  Not  because  I  liked  it, 
but  because  I  hated  it. 

"It  took  me  six  years,  ten  hours'  work  a  day  with  my 
hands  and  eight  hours'  work  a  night  with  my  head.  Not 
all  the  time,  of  course.  I  'd  break  loose  now  and  then  and 
have  a  hell  of  a  big  spree  to  freshen  me  up  and  give  me 
a  new  start.  I  always  knew  what  I  wanted,  though,  and  at 
last  I  had  it — a  first-class  engineering  education.  And 
I  knew  what  to  do  with  it  when  I  got  it,  too.  There's 
where  I  had  it  all  over  any  college  boy  that  ever  turned 
up  the  bottoms  of  his  pressed  pants. — Well,  and  the  next 
thing  I  knew  I  was  turning  up  the  bottoms  of  mine,  too." 

It  was  queer  to  see  him  detached  like  this,  speculative. 
He'd  told  Jennie,  from  time  to  time,  innumerable  stories, 
incidents  of  that  six  years'  struggle,  for  an  education; 


82  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

queer  shifts  he'd  adopted,  fantastic  and  often  not  quite 
credible  adventures.  But  he'd  never  given  her  a  glimpse 
before  of  the  wire  upon  which  these  beads  were  strung; 
the  purpose  and  passion  that  held  them  together.  She 
felt  closer  to  the  real  man  to-night  than  she  'd  ever  been. 

She  left  unbroken  for  a  little  while  the  reflective  silence 
into  which  he'd  fallen,  before  she  prompted  him.  But 
presently  she  got  him  going  again  by  suggesting  that  the 
cause  of  his  concern  over  the  crease  in  his  trousers  was 
Annabel. 

"Why,  no,  not  exactly,"  he  said.  "I  don't  remember 
thinking  much  of  her  just  at  first.  I  don't  believe  I  saw 
much  of  her.  She  may  have  been  away  from  home,  or 
she  may  have  been  there  and  I  not  noticed  her.  She 
wasn't  the  sort  of  girl  that  I  ever  had  noticed.  No,  it 
was  the  old  folks  I  made  up  to.  They  sort  of  appealed  to 
me.  They  were  so  fussy  and  innocent.  I  must  have  been 
close  to  thirty  years  old  then,  but  in  some  ways  I  was  a 
good  deal  of  a  kid.  And  it  was  a  kid  trick  I  played,  pre 
tending  at  first  to  be  just  as  innocent  as  they  were.  I  had 
had  a  good  pious  bringing-up,  you  see,  knew  the  Bible  and 
all  that.  Lord !  I  know  it  yet.  It  was  all  just  for  fun,  in  a 
way.  I  mean  I  wasn  't  trying  to  get  anything  on  it.  But 
for  a  while  I  was  as  careful  and  tidy  and'  regular  .  .  . 
Shaved  every  morning,  telephoned  if  I  found  I  was  going 
to  be  late  to  meals.  Even  went  to  church  with  them  a 
few  times  at  first.  Of  course,  I  didn't  keep  it  up.  It 
wasn't  very  long  before  they  began  to  get  on  to  me;  and 
as  soon  as  they  did,  they  began  to  worry  about  Annabel." 

Once  more  he  needed  prompting.  Jennie  had  to  ask  him 
what  Annabel  was  like. 

"Why,  there  was  nothing  the  matter  with  her  looks," 
Joe  said.  "Now  I  think  of  it,  she  looked  a  little  like 
Henry's  sister,  though  I  wasn't  reminded  of  it  last  night." 
He  grinned.  "Annabel  never  dressed  like  that,  to  be 
sure,  and  she'd  have  drunk  poison  before  she'd  have 
touched  a  cigarette,  but  there  is  some  sort  of  resemblance, 
for  a  fact." 


THE  BETTER  HALF  83 

"I've  never  seen  Henry's  sister,"  Jennie  rather  firmly, 
reminded  him.  "How  old  was  Annabel?  What  color 
was  her  hair?" 

"Lightish,"  Joe  said;  "not  yellow;  there  wasn't  much 
color  in  it.  I  was  fooled  on  her  age,  all  right.  I  took  it 
for  granted  that  she  was  just  a  kid,  barely  twenty,  if  as 
old  as  that.  When  she  gave  her  age  at  the  license  bureau 
up  in  Milwaukee  where  we'd  run  off  to  get  married,  I 
found  she  wasn't  but  five  or  six  years  younger  than  I 
was. — It  would  have  made  quite  a  difference  if  I'd  known 
that  sooner,"  he  added. 

Jennie  remarked  that  twenty-five  wasn't  too  old  for  a 
girl  to  marry.  But  Joe  said  this  wasn't  what  he  meant. 
She  was  too  old  not  to  be  more  grown-up  than  she  was. 

"You  see,  she'd  been  having  a  fight  with  her  father 
and  mother.  I  'd  seen  something  of  the  sort  going  on  from 
the  first.  It  had  struck  me,  every  now  and  then,  that  I'd 
interrupted  a  scene  of  some  sort,  when  I  came  into  a  room 
where  they  all  were.  And  Annabel  would  sit  through  a 
meal  sometimes  without  saying  a  word,  but  meaning  a 
devil  of  a  lot.  But  one  night,  out  on  the  front  porch,  she 
broke  loose  and  told  me  her  troubles. 

"She  wanted  to  be  an  artist,  a  sculptor,  and  they 
wouldn't  let  her.  She'd  been  going  down  to  the  Art  In 
stitute  for  quite  a  while  taking  lessons  in  drawing  and 
designing,  china  painting,  I  don't  know  what — maybe  a 
little  modeling.  But  now  it  was  a  question  of  a  life  class, 
and  they  wouldn't  hear  of  it.  They  were  shocked  that 
she  wanted  to,  thought  it  was  improper  and  that  if  she  was 
really  a  nice-minded  girl  as  she'd  been  brought  up  to  be 
she'd  see  it  that  way  herself. 

"Well,  that  interested  me  in  her  a  whole  lot  more  than 
I'd  been  before,  and  the  line  her  father  and  mother  had 
taken  seemed  so  damned  silly  that  the  next  chance  I  got 
I  tried  to  put  in  a  word  for  her.  It  was  a  fool  thing  to 
do,  of  course.  It  got  Annabel  in  wrong,  worse  than  ever, 
for  discussing  such  a  subject  with  a  young  man — she,  her 
self,  was  furious  with  me  at  first  for  not  having  seen  that 


84  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

— and  they  were  already  suspicious  that  I  wasn't  quite 
so  good  as  I  looked. 

''Now,  here's  a  damn  funny  thing,  Jennie.  Here's  a 
question  I've  asked  myself  a  thousand  times.  Will  you 
tell  me  why  I  didn't  just  pack  my  trunk  at  that  point  and 
clear  out?  I  was  tired  of  the  old  people  and  I  wasn't  in 
love  with  Annabel,  not  one  little  bit.  I  didn't  even  want 
her  in  a  temporary  sort  of  way.  There  were  girls  grow 
ing  on  every  bush  that  were  more  attractive,  that  way,  than 
she  was.  But  I  didn't  get  out.  I  went  on  butting  myself 
farther  and  farther  in.  "We  had  a  hell  of  a  time.  The 
old  folks  would  hardly  speak  to  me.  They  sat  around 
and  kept  watch  so  that  I  shouldn't  be  alone  with  Annabel. 
I  think  the  only  reason  they  didn't  turn  me  out  of  the 
house  was  because  they  figured  it  was  easier  to  keep  us 
apart  as  things  were,  having  a  line  on  me,  than  if  they 
hadn't  any  idea  where  I  was. 

"Well,  the  up-shot  of  it  was  that  one  day,  along  that 
summer,  we  took  the  day  boat — the  old  whaleback,  it  was 
— to  Milwaukee,  got  a  license  and  a  minister  to  marry  us 
and  spent  the  night  at  the  Plankington  Hotel.  Came 
home  on  the  train  the  next  morning. 

"The  old  folks  wouldn't  take  us  in, — and  it  wasn't  a 
bluff  either.  But  I  found  a  furnished  flat  over  in  Hyde 
Park — it  was  easy  enough  to  do  in  those  days — and  we 
set  up  housekeeping.  I'd  suggested  a  couple  of  rooms  in 
some  family  hotel,  so  that  she  could  have  more  time  to 
herself.  But  she  didn't  want  that.  I  was  beginning  to 
wonder  about  that  famous  career  of  hers  that  the  whole 
row  had  been  about.  Finally  I  asked  her  one  day  why  she 
didn't  go  over  to  the  Art  Institute  and  register  in  the  life 
class.  I  remember  how  she  looked  at  that  and  just  what 
she  said.  She  gave  me  a  stare  and  then  a  sort  of  laugh, 
doubtful  whether  I  wasn't  joking,  and  she  said:  'Why,  you 
silly  old  thing,  what  do  I  want  to  go  there  for,  now?'  " 

To  Jennie,  the  pattern  had  looked  clear,  bald  fairly, 
from  the  first  mention  of  Annabel's  confidences  about  a 
career.  Mere  propinquity  hadn't  been  enough  to  attract 


THE  BETTER  HALF  85 

Joe  to  the  rather  colorless  girl.  So  the  family  had  tried 
something  else.  They  were  all  in  it,  of  course,  and  they'd 
played  the  game  very  cleverly.  They  had  adopted  what 
was  perhaps  the  one  trick  that  would  have  worked.  She 
gave  him,  when  he  paused  over  Annabel's  revelation,  a 
commiserating  smile. 

"Poor  old  Joe,"  she  said. 

But  this  was  enough  to  show  him  how  she  had  taken  the 
story  and  he  dissented  vigorously  from  her  interpretation 
of  it. 

"You've  got  it  all  wrong,  Jennie.  They  didn't  want  me 
to  marry  her.  It  looked  like  the  wrath  of  God  to  them 
when  they  first  heard  about  it,  and  it  never  looked  like 
anything  else.  They  never  forgave  me. 

"She  didn't  really  want  to  marry  me  herself.  I  bul 
lied  her  into  it.  She  cried  most  of  the  way  to  Milwaukee 
on  the  boat,  and  I  think  she  might  have  backed  out  of  it 
at  last  if  the  idea  of  turning  up  at  home  late  at  night  and 
telling  her  folks  where  she'd  been  hadn't  scared  her  worse 
than  going  through  the  ceremony  with  me. 

"She  hadn't  any  idea  what  marriage  was  about,  Jennie. 
Apparently  supposed  there  was  nothing  to  it  beyond  house 
keeping  and  a  little  familiarity.  And  she  couldn't  stand 
me,  that's  the  long  and  the  short  of  it.  Lord!  But  she 
was  conscientious; — all  three  of  them  were  that.  And 
she  must  have  had  a  talk  with  her  mother  that  straight 
ened  things  out  a  little.  The  one  thing  that  reconciled 
her  to  the  relation  at  all  was  that  it  was  legal  and  binding, 
- — going  to  last  forever. 

"I  can't  think  of  a  worse  mix-up  than  that.  Because 
with  me,  well,  it  had  been  like  this.  I'd  never  had  any 
thing  to  do  with  a  woman  before — I  never  have  since,  for 
that  matter — who  wasn't  in  love  with  me,  crazy  about  me, 
for  the  time  being  anyhow.  So  this  was  wrong  all 
around.  Yet  she  might  have  made  some  other  sort  of 
man  a  good  wife  and  been  happy  with  him.  But  she 
didn't  like  me,  even  in  other  ways.  I  think  I  frightened 
her  without  meaning  to.  The  way  I  talked  shocked  her. 


86  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

I  tried  to  reform  for  a  while.  Good  God!  I've  seen  her 
turn  white  over  a  plain  'hell'  or  a  'damn'  or  two,  that  I'd 
use  without  thinking.  I  never  swore  at  her. — Never  swore 
at  you,  either,  did  I? 

"It  looked  for  a  while — oh,  at  the  end  of  three  months 
or  so — as  if  we  might  make  a  go  of  it.  She  liked  our 
little  flat,  dusting  and  sticking  the  furniture  around  in 
new  ways,  and  making  fancy  desserts  and  things  that  she 
got  out  of  magazines.  And,  in  a  way,  I  liked  it,  too.  I 
liked  the  feeling  of  being  anchored  to  something,  having  a 
real  address  in  the  telephone  book.  I  liked  feeling  re 
spectable, — and  I  was,  too.  Didn't  do  any  bumming 
around  outside. 

' '  And  then  all  of  a  sudden  she  got  to  hating  me  a  whole 
lot  worse.  Took  to  spending  most  of  the  time  at  home 
with  her  folks.  I  tried  to  put  my  foot  down  on  that,  as 
long  as  they  wouldn't  let  me  in  the  house.  But  it  didn't 
do  any  good.  She  went  more  and  more  and  tried  to  keep 
it  dark.  "Well,  at  last  I  got  the  offer  of  that  big  job  down 
in  Lima.  I  didn't  really  need  it,  because  I  was  getting  on 
first-rate  in  Chicago,  but  it  looked  to  me  like  a  good  chance 
for  a  showdown.  So  I  accepted  it  and  then  I  put  it  up  to 
her.  She  could  come  with  me  or  she  could  quit  me,  just 
as  she  liked.  Well,  she  quit,  and  I  don't  know  as  I  blame 
her.  I  certainly  didn't  try  to  make  it  look  good  to  her. 
I'd  told  her  some  of  my  jungle  stories,  and  I  guess  she 
thought  Peru  was  like  that.  She  may  have  thought  that 
the  climate  went  on  getting  hotter  the  farther  south  you 
went.  I  didn't  explain  any.  I  wanted  to  get  loose,  that's 
the  gospel  truth.  She  went  back  to  her  folks,  and  I 
cleared  out  without  saying  good-by  to  her." 

The  only  thing  about  this  recital  which  Jennie  found  it 
hard  to  understand  was  Joe's  seriousness  about  it,  the 
weight  he  attached  to  the  episode.  It  seemed  strange  that 
so  inconsiderable  a  person  as  Annabel  could  have  left  any 
sort  of  mark  upon  him,  let  alone  have  bitten  so  deeply  into 
his  memory.  He  hadn't  loved  her.  He  couldn't  pos 
sibly  have  loved  a  person  like  that.  But  mightn't  he 


THE  BETTER  HALF  87 

have  loved,  and  gone  on  loving,  silently  and  secretly  and 
perhaps  a  little  shamefacedly,  the  things  she  feebly  rep 
resented  to  him;  domesticity, — all  that  sort  of  thing? 
Had  he  carried  in  his  heart  all  these  years  an  un 
acknowledged  longing  to  be  regular  and  respectable?  It 
was  a  startling  notion  of  Joe,  but  it  offered  the  only  ex 
planation  she  could  think  of. 

"And  you've  never  seen  her  since?"  she  asked,  after  a 
few  moments'  of  musing  silence,  "nor  heard  from  her?" 

"Oh,  I've  heard  from  her  or  about  her,  off  and  on.  I 
wrote  to  her  from  down  in  South  America,  asking  her  if 
she  didn't  want  to  change  her  mind  and  come  down  and 
join  me.  As  things  were,  it  was  natural  enough  she  didn't. 

"I  didn't  come  back  to  the  States  until  nineteen-nine, 
and  when  I  started  I  went  as  far  as  Panama  with  the  idea 
that  I'd  go  on  up  the  west  coast,  drop  off  at  San  Pedro, 
and  go  on  up  and  see  her.  If  I  'd  made  the  big  strike  I  'd 
been  playing  for  down  in  Chile  and  just  missed,  I  would 
have  gone  to  see  her,  no  doubt  about  it.  I'd  have  been 
rich  then.  Able  to  make  a  proposition  that  I  needn't  be 
ashamed  of,  however  she  took  it — if  you  see  what  I  mean. 
But  I  wasn't  rich  by  a  devil  of  a  way.  I  had  just  about 
enough  to  start  myself  again  decently  in  Chicago,  to  come 
back  looking  like  a  successful  man.  It's  always  been  that 
way  with  me,  pretty  much.  I  'm  always  either  just  broke, 
or  just  on  the  point  of  making  a  hell  of  a  big  thing.  Any 
how,  I  came  up  to  Chicago  by  a  fruit  boat  to  New  Orleans 
instead  of  going  round  the  long  way.  And,  what  with 
the  war  and  one  thing  and  another,  I  haven 't  been  in  shape 
to  fix  things  up  with  her  until  now.  And  now,  just  as 
I  am  ready,  I  find  out  that  she's  tying  a  can  to  me. 

"It's  a  funny  thing.  I  was  sore  as  hell  when  I  read 
that  lawyer's  letter.  Since  she  had  waited  all  that  while, 
I  thought  she  might  have  waited  a  little  longer.  She  might 
have,  too,  for  that  matter." 

It  was  funny,  Jennie  tacitly  agreed;  funnier  than  he 
knew,  to  see  him  still  nursing  a  grouch  over  the  incon 
stancy  his  wife  had  shown  in  not  waiting  another  year  on 


88  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

the  end  of  twenty.  But  she  checked  an  impulse  to  laugh 
at  him  openly  and  instead  asked  him,  as  soberly  as  she 
could  manage,  if  he  had  any  idea  why  Mrs.  Greer  was  do 
ing  it. 

"Oh,  another  man,  I  suppose,"  he  said. 

"When  she  cried  out  incredulously  at  that  he  wanted  to 
know  why  not.  Wasn't  it  likely  enough?  "She's  only 
forty-five  or  thereabouts.  Probably  doesn  't  look  any  older 
to  speak  of  than  she  did  at  thirty.  She  wouldn't — a 
woman  like  Annabel — unless  she's  got  fat.  Some  well- 
preserved  widower  of  sixty-odd — there's  enough  of  them 
like  that  out  in  Pasadena,  God  knows — has  been  making 
up  to  her.  Bungalow  stuff;  roses  and  orange  blossoms; 
warm  nights!  Lord,  yes!" 

He  turned  upon  her  with  an  impish  gleam  in  his  eye. 

"Want  to  bet  me  a  hundred  dollars  I  haven't  got  it 
doped  out  right?"  he  asked. 

"No,"  she  said  thoughtfully,  "I  don't  believe  I  do." 

She  often  made  bets  with  Joe,  and  not  infrequently  col 
lected  them,  too;  but  never  when  that  gleam  in  his  eye 
warned  her  that  he  was  proposing  a  sure  thing.  Those 
hadn't  been  blind  speculations  of  his  about  Annabel  and 
her  well-preserved  widower.  Somehow  or  other  he'd 
managed  to  inform  himself  of  the  facts. 

"When  was  it  you  got  her  lawyer's  letter?"  she  asked. 

"Oh,  quite  a  while  ago,"  he  admitted.  "Just  before  I 
started  north." 

"You  aren't  going  to  contest  the  divorce,  are  you?" 

"Of  course  not,"  he  grumbled.  "What  would  I  con 
test  it  for? — Oh,  I  haven't  been  putting  detectives  on  her, 
if  that 's  what  you  are  getting  at.  Only,  if  you  don 't  want 
to  be  walked  on  in  a  case  like  that,  it's  just  as  well  to  have 
something  to  bargain  with.  I  had  Nathan  get  in  touch 
with  a  lawyer,  a  perfectly  respectable  chap,  out  in  Pasa 
dena,  and  asked  him  to  look  up  the  main  facts,  just  so  I  'd 
know  where  I  stood.  There  is  a  widower,  all  right,  a  re 
tired  Chautauqua  lecturer  with  a  weak  throat.  He 's  got  a 
little  lemon  grove  just  outside  Pasadena.  I  don't  know 
whether  he's  got  one  eye  on  Annabel's  money  or  not. 


THE  BETTER  HALF  89 

" — Oh,  it  isn't  hers  yet,"  he  went  on,  answering  Jen 
nie's  exclamation  of  surprise.  "But  it  seems  old  man  Fan 
ning 's  done  pretty  well,  especially  in  the  last  year  or  two. 
He  always  had  a  fancy  for  bum  real-estate,  and  he  had 
some  in  Los  Angeles  that  they  found  oil  on.  It's  nothing 
enormous,  would  run  to  a  couple  of  hundred  thousand  per 
haps.  He'll  be  getting  on  in  his  seventies  by  now,  so  it's 
reasonable  to  suppose  that  Annabel  will  get  it  some  day." 

He  got  up  with  a  spring,  chucked  the  butt  of  his  cigar 
into  the  fireplace,  and  flexed  his  arms.  "Well,  the  lemon 
grower  is  welcome  to  Annabel,  and  the  money,  too,  if  he 
can  get  it.  I  hope  he  does.  And  she 's  welcome  to  him,  as 
long  as  she  doesn't  try  to  get  rough  with  me."  But  his 
minatory  tone  made  so  sharp  a  contrast  with  these  benig 
nant  sentiments  that  Jennie  looked  up  at  him  inquiringly. 

"You  mean  if  Annabel  doesn't  try  to  gouge  you  for 
too  much  alimony?"  she  asked. 

He  checked  the  movement  he  was  making  and  scowled 
at  her  in  a  way  that  showed  this  wasn't  what  he  had 
meant. 

' '  No, ' '  he  said,  ' '  I  wasn  't  thinking  of  that.  I  was  think 
ing  of  the  grounds  for  divorce  she  puts  in  her  bill.  I'll 
look  bad  enough  at  the  best,  but  I  W7on't  be  made  to  look 
any  worse  than  necessary." 

Why  in  the  world,  Jennie  wondered,  should  he  care  how 
he  looked.  It  was  plain  that  he  did  care  tremendously. 
Not  on  his  own  account.  It  couldn't  possibly  be  that. 
But  who  else  was  there  to  consider?  For  a  moment,  a 
wild  notion  of  Henry  Craven's  sister  flashed  through 
her  mind,  to  be  dismissed  as  preposterous.  Then  came  the 
real  idea,  the  luminous  surmise. 

"Joe,"  she  asked  him  suddenly,  "did  Annabel  have  a 
baby?" 

3 

She  saw  before  he  could  answer  that  her  shot  had  hit 
the  mark.  There  was  something  likably  boyish  in  the  way 
it  took  him  aback  that  she  should  guess,  and  in  his  trans 
parent  attempt  to  hide  his  dismay  by  minimizing  her  dis 
covery. 


90 

"I  should  think  you  might  have  seen  that  long  ago/'  he 
grumbled. 

"Well,  she  supposed  she  might  have  guessed.  The  ex 
istence  of  a  child  was  the  one  answer  to  the  enigma  that  had 
been  puzzling  her  during  the  whole  of  his  recital.  This 
was  the  one  way  by  which  a  colorless,  inconsiderable  per 
son  like  Annabel  could  leave  her  mark  upon  him.  It  was 
the  simplest,  most  natural  thing  in  the  world. 

"A  boy  or  a  girl?"  she  asked,  when  her  mind  had  got 
into  its  stride  again. 

'  *  God !  If  it  had  been  a  boy, ' '  said  Joe,  "  I  'd  have  gone 
back.  I  'd  never  have  left  a  son  of  mine  to  be  brought  up 
by — Fannings.  Being  a  girl,  it  seemed  to  belong  to  them 
more.  But  at  that  I  almost  went  back,  as  I  told  you. 

"Jennie,  I  never  was  so  flabbergasted  in  my  life  as  the 
day  I  got  that  letter,  down  in  Lima,  when  I'd  been  away 
about  a  year.  I'd  written  Annabel,  asking  her  to  come 
down  and  join  me.  She  wrote  back  that  she  couldn't 
come,  because  she  didn't  think  the  climate  would  be  good 
for  'baby';  and  then  she  went  on, — I  remember  her  exact 
words, — 'I  guess  you  don't  know  about  her.  Her  name  is 
Beatrice  and  she  is  eight  months  old.' 

"That  eight  months  made  it  plain  enough  what  had 
been  the  matter  with  her  when  I  quit.  Damn  it!  Why 
couldn't  she  have  told  me  what  was  on  the  way?  I'd 
have  treated  her  more  carefully,  if  I'd  only  understood. 
That's  the  good  woman  of  it,  I  suppose.  She  and  her 
mother  are  the  only  two  of  that  sort  I've  ever  known  and 
I  guess  they  weren't  meant  for  the  likes  of  me.  I've  al 
ways  had  an  idea  it  was  the  mother's  doing  that  Annabel 
kept  it  dark.  She  hoped  I'd  clear  out.  I  was  a  Beelzebub 
to  her,  no  less.  "Well,  they  put  me  in  wrong  that  time; 
left  me  looking  damned  cheap  and  feeling  cheaper  than  I 
looked." 

Jennie  had  never  seen  him  so  deeply  moved.  Nor  had 
she  ever  understood  him  so  well.  This  new  angle  of  vis 
ion  gave  the  effect  of  substituting  a  stereoscopic  view  for  a 
flat  photograph. 


THE  BETTER  HALF  91 

The  fact  that  he  had  a  daughter,  born  in  wedlock  of  a 
good  woman,  had  been  working  in  him  all  these  years,  a 
vital  ferment.  His  desertion  and  neglect  of  her — of  them 
— had  remained  an  nnhealed  sore  in  his  memory.  The  de 
sertion  hadn't  been  altogether  his  fault,  but  why  had  he 
persisted  in  his  neglect?  Well,  that  wasn't  so  hard  to 
understand,  either,  when  you  knew  Joe.  He'd  spoken, 
two  or  three  times  to-night,  of  his  wish  to  do  the  handsome 
thing,  to  do  it  up  brown.  With  him,  it  would  have  to  be 
done  that  way  or  it  couldn't  be  done  at  all.  He  couldn't, 
in  any  common  or  rational  way,  be  a  devoted  husband  and 
father;  but  by  some  sort  of  transformation  scene,  which 
the  possession  of  a  lot  of  money  would  make  possible,  he 
might  become  a  sort  of  fairy  god-father.  And  this  was 
what  he  had  been  dreaming  of,  looking  forward  to,  shying 
away  from  under  a.  sense  that  the  properties  and  the 
apparatus  weren't  ready  yet.  Another  month — or  year — 
and  the  scene  could  be  bigger  and  more  splendid.  And 
too,  most  likely,  there  was  a  real  shyness,  a  boyishness,  be 
hind  it  all  which  made  him  clutch  at  excuses  for  delay. 

Yet  Jennie  found  it  easy  to  believe,  to-night, — she  was  in 
a,  for  her,  distinctly  sentimental  mood  about  him — that 
he  had  been  hungry,  all  those  years,  for  the  very  thing 
which  a  boyish  perversity  had  driven  him  to  flout,  respect 
able  domesticity,  a  wife,  a  daughter,  an  anchorage.  It 
was,  she  guessed,  the  feeling  that  he  had  been  cheated  out 
of  all  that,  having  come  so  near  attaining  it,  that  had  made 
him  so  restless  and  quarrelsome.  If  he'd  had  the  luck  to 
marry  the  right  sort  of  woman  .  .  . 

She  roused  herself  at  the  end  of  a  long  reflective  silence 
to  remark  that  Beatrice  must,  by  now,  be  pretty  near 
grown  up. 

' '  She 's  nineteen, ' '  he  answered.  "  I've  never  known  her 
exact  birthday.  I've  always  known  about  how  old  she 
was,  though,"  he  added. 

"Don't  you  know  at  all  what  she's  like?  Haven't  you 
any  sort  of  picture  of  her?" 

"Picture!     Lord,  no!     I  told  that  Pasadena  lawyer  to 


92  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

try  to  get  me  one.  But  he  hasn't  succeeded;  at  least,  it 
hasn't  turned  up  yet.  Why,  I  suppose  she  must  be  a  good 
deal  like  Annabel.  She's  sure  to  have  been  brought  up 
like  that.  Innocent.  Well,  that's  the  way  to  bring  up 
a  girl,  all  right.  Do  you  know  those  old-fashioned  bou 
quets  that  are  coming  into  style  again,  with  a  paper  frill 
around  them?  I  suspect  she's  a  good  deal  like  that." 

Looking  up  at  him,  near  to  tears  with  a  sudden  sym 
pathy,  she  saw  his  face  darken.  It  was  so  startling  a 
change  that  she  cried  out,  "Joe!  What  is  it!" 

"Can  you  see,"  he  asked,  "how  that  child  has  been 
brought  up  to  think  about  me?  They  will  have  used  me 
as  the  bad  man  to  frighten  her  with.  'Your  father  will 
get  you,  if  you're  a  naughty  girl,  Beatrice!' — God!  I 
can  hear  old  Ma  Fanning  say  it.  And  now  she's  old 
enough  to  think  for  herself,  a  nice  little  girl  like  that,  she 
probably  turns  cold  all  over  when  she  thinks  of  me,  afraid 
I  may  crop  up  and  disgrace  them  all.  Goes  and  gets 
into  bed  with  her  mother  to  be  comforted.  That  may  be 
the  reason  Annabel's  given  her  for  getting  a  divorce. 
Well,  I  suppose  it's  what  I  deserve,  all  right. 

"But  where  I  stick  is  at  that  damned  widower,  googling 
at  the  kid,  pawing  her,  telling  her  he's  her  daddy  now, 
holding  her  on  his  knee.  Not  if  I  know  myself! 

"There  you  are,  Jennie!  Now  we're  down  to  brass 
tacks.  If  anybody's  going  to  be  that  child's  father,  I  am. 
That's  what  I  wanted  to  put  up  to  you  to-night." 

"You  mean,"  she  asked,  after  lighting  a  cigarette  to 
give  herself  the  appearance,  at  least,  of  calm  reflection, 
"that  you  want  to  take  her  away  from  her  mother  alto 
gether  and  bring  her  out  here  to  live  with  you?" 

"You've  got  it,"  he  said.  "That's  the  idea  to  a  dot. 
I  want  you  to  help  me  figure  out  how  it's  to  be  done. 
She 's  of  age,  you  want  to  remember ;  under  California  law. 
I  looked  it  up." 

He  prowled  restlessly  about  the  room  while  she  smoked 
half-way  through  her  cigarette;  then,  with  his  familiar 
impatience,  prodded  her  for  results. 


93 

"What's  the  simplest  way?  That's  the  place  to  begin. 
And  what's  the  objection  to  it?  Come  along.  Think  out 
loud.  You'll  have  come  as  far  as  that." 

' '  It 's  a  crazy  idea,  Joe, ' '  she  then  burst  out  desperately. 
"I  know  how  much  you  want  her  and  how  much  you  hate 
the  other  thing.  But  it  can't  be  done.  Even  if  you  did 
get  her  to  come  to  you,  which  I  don't  believe  you  could, 
what  would  you  do  with  her  when  she  was  here?  She 
couldn't  live  alone  in  this  flat  with  you  away  half  the 
time.  And  anyway,  the  sort  of  life  you  live  ..." 

"Damn  the  sort  of  life  I  live!"  he  interrupted. 
' '  What 's  that  got  to  do  with  her  ?  It 's  never  had  anything 
to  do  with  you,  has  it?  And  you've  known  me  better  than 
anybody  else,  for  seven  years.  If  I  could  be  decent  to 
you  for  that  length  of  time,  don't  you  think  I  could  to 
my  own  daughter?  It's  her  life  that  we're  talking  about. 
I  tell  you,  nothing  wrong  would  ever  come  within  sighting 
distance  of  it.  She  'd  never  learn  anything  out  of  the  way 
from  me  or  from  anything  she  ever  saw  me  do.  There'll 
never  be  any  parties  in  this  flat,  Jennie.  Not  as  long  as 
she  makes  her  home  in  it." 

"She  couldn't  live  here  alone  in  it,  anyhow.  Not  with 
you  away  half  the  time." 

"I  wouldn't  try  to  keep  her  here  all  the  time.  I'd 
send  her  to  school,  for  one  thing.  Williamson's  got  a 
daughter  just  about  her  age  who's  away  at  some  boarding- 
school  or  other.  I'll  find  out  from  him  where  it  is  and 
send  Beatrice  to  the  same  place.  That's  a  good  idea. 
They'll  make  friends.  It'll  give  Beatrice  the  right  sort  of 
start." 

"There  won't  be  any  school  till  next  September,"  Jennie 
pointed  out.  "This  year's  practically  over  now.  And 
after  the  first  of  July  you'll  have  to  be  up  North  most  of 
the  time." 

He  grappled  with  this  difficulty  for  a  moment;  then 
faced  her  triumphantly  with  a  solution. 

"Henry  Craven's  persuaded  his  sister  to  take  a  cottage 
somewhere  on  Cape  Cod  this  summer.  He's  worried  about 


94  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Her  for  some  reason ;  thinks  she  needs  a  change.  And  the 
Aldrichs  have  offered  to  loan  her  their  place.  She's 
agreed  to  go  for  a  couple  of  months  if  she  can  find  some 
body  to  go  with  her.  Well,  she  could  take  Beatrice  along, 
just  as  well  as  not,  even  if  she  does  get  somebody  else,  too. 
I  could  fix  it  so  that  the  trip  wouldn  't  have  to  cost  Henry 
anything.  She  doesn't  want  to  go  till  July,  Henry  says, 
but  that  will  just  give  Beatrice  and  me  a  chance  to  start 
getting  acquainted." 

Jennie  felt  her  mind  going  blank.  What  could  you  do 
with  a  man  like  that?  She  got  herself  together,  chucked 
away  her  cigarette,  and  charged  the  position,  head  on. 
"Joe,  you're  wild,"  she  said.  "You  can't  do  things  like 
that — not  outside  your  own  office,  you  can't.  They  won't 
work.  You  haven't  an  idea,  really,  what  the  girl  is  like. 
You  don't  know  a  thing  about  her  tastes  or  her  ways. 
You  don't  know  whether  she'd  like  these  people,  or  not. — 
Nor  whether  they'd  like  her." 

"They'd  better  like  her!"  he  retorted,  half  aloud. 
Then,  with  a  laugh,  "Look  here,  Jennie!  Do  you  want  to 
bet  a  thousand  dollars,  real  money,  that  if  I  ask  Miss 
Craven  to  take  Beatrice  under  her  wing  for  a  few  weeks, 
down  East,  she  won 't  grab  it  like  a  trout  ?  Come  on,  now. 
Don't  be  a  crab  unless  you're  willing  to  back  your 
opinion." 

Was  that  subtlety,  she  wondered,  or  naivete?  Had  he 
just  this  moment  blundered  into  it,  or  had  he  thought  it 
all  out,  in  that  amazing  brain  of  his,  at  their  dinner,  the 
night  before?  He  being  Joe,  you  never  could  be  sure. 

"No,"  she  said,  beaten;  "I'm  not  taking  any  bets  with 
you,  to-night." 

"Anyhow,"  he  immediately  went  on,  not  stopping  to 
gloat  over  her  discomfiture,  "this  is  all  barking  up  the 
wrong  tree.  There's  no  argument  whether  we  want  the 
girl  or  not.  The  question  is,  how  are  we  going  to  get 
her?" 

"Go  out  there  yourself  and  see  her,"  she  answered 
instantly. 


THE  BETTER  HALF  95 

He  nodded  thoughtfully.  "Yes,  that's  the  simplest 
thing.  But  it  wouldn't  do.  First  place,  I'd  scare  her 
to  death — just  my  looks,  I  mean.  She  mustn't  see  me 
until  she's  been  told  I'm  not  so  bad  as  I  look.  Second 
place,  if  I  was  there,  I  couldn't  get  out  of  seeing  Annabel, 
and  if  I  ever  got  drawn  into  an  argument  with  her  and 
old  man  Fanning,  let  alone  the  widower,  I'd  spill  all  the 
beans.  No,  that's  out.  What's  the  next  thing?" 

Then,  after  a  dubious  pause,  "I  was  wondering  about 
you  or  Henry;  which  of  you  would  be  best  to  send  out, 
for  me,  I  mean." 

At  that,  she  laughed  outright.  "Send  us  both,  Joe, 
together.  We'd  make  a  wonderful  pair  of  kidnappers." 
Then,  seriously  and  patiently,  as  one  would  deal  with  a 
little  boy,  she  went  on,  "Anybody  you  sent  in  your  place, 
Joe,  would  have  to  explain  who  they  were  and  why  they 
were  mixed  up  in  the  business,  and  before  they  got  through 
the  whole  thing  would  look  like  a  crime  and  you'd  look 
like  an  ogre.  No,  if  you  can't  go  yourself,  you'll  have  to 
write  a  letter." 

By  the  way  he  grumbled  over  this  decision,  she  was  able 
to  guess  that  it  was  the  one  he  himself  had  come  to.  But 
his  manner  of  acquiescing  in  it  took  her  once  more  by 
surprise.  He  went  over  to  a  desk  in  the  corner  of  the 
room  and  came  back  with  a  pad  and  pencil  which  he  put 
into  her  hand. 

"All  right,"  he  said.    "We'll  do  it  now." 

"You  don't  mean  you're  going  to  dictate  it!"  she  ex 
claimed.  "A  letter  like  that?" 

"It's  the  only  way  I  can  do  it,"  he  assured  her.  "I'll 
copy  it  out  in  my  own  handwriting  after  you've  tran 
scribed  it.  What's  the  matter?  You  haven't  forgotten 
your  pothooks,  have  you?" 

"Oh,  all  right,"  she  told  him.     "Go  ahead." 

He  began:  "  'My  dear  little  girl:  This  letter  is  from 
your  father.  I  hope  you  won't  stop  reading  though,  until 
I  have  told  you  why  I  am  writing.  It's  because  I  have 
just  heard  of  your  mother's  plan  to  get  a  divorce  from  me 


96  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

and  marry  again.  I  don't  blame  her  for  doing  that,  but 
it  strikes  me  that  the  new  scheme  may  leave  you  out  in 
the  cold,  as  it  leaves  me,  and  that  maybe  this  is  a  good 
time  for  us  to  get  acquainted.' 

"I  put  that  in,"  he  paused  to  explain  to  Jennie  whom 
he  saw  looking  rather  thoughtful  over  it,  "on  the  off 
chance  that  Annabel  hasn't  told  her  the  real  reason.  She 
may  be  keeping  the  marriage  end  of  it  dark.  It  would 
be  easy  enough  to  do  with  a  kid  like  that." 

Jennie  nodded  a  little  dubiously,  but  made  no  remark, 
and  he  went  on. 

11  'I  don't  know  how  much  you  have  been  told  about 
me,  but  I  realize  that  you  must  think  of  me  as  a  pretty 
bad  sort  of  person.  From  your  mother's  angle  on  it,  I 
surely  have  been,  and  from  yours,  too.  I've  had  a  hard, 
rough  life,  full  of  ups  and  downs.  I  don't  know  that 
there's  much  use  in  telling  you  a  thing  you  will  find  it 
so  hard  to  believe,  but  it  is  true,  nevertheless,  that  I  have 
been  thinking  about  you  ever  since  I  first  knew  I  had  a 
daughter,  and  have  been  wishing  I  could  do  for  you  the 
things  that  a  father  ought  to  do. 

"  'I  have  only  just  got  things  in  shape  so  I  can.  I  am 
now  the  head  of  a  big  business  and  some  of  the  biggest 
bankers  and  such  in  Chicago  are  associated  with  me.  I 
have  a  good  apartment  at  the  above  address  and  two 
motor-cars.  I  am  sure  I  can  make  you  comfortable,  for 
a  visit  at  least,  and  give  you  a  good  time.  I  don't  ask  for 
more  than  a  visit  until,  you  have  had  time  to  decide 
whether  you  care  enough  for  me  to  adopt  me  as  your  real 
father,  or  not.'  ' 

Again  he  paused,  and  this  time  evidently  in  the  grip  of 
a  real  difficulty.  "That's  the  devil  of  a  letter,"  he  burst 
out  at  last.  "How  do  I  know  she'll  get  it?  If  Annabel 
sees  it  first,  with  a  Chicago  post-mark  and  all,  she'll  open 
it  sure.  And  if  she  has  been  keeping  her  widower  dark,  the 
girl  will  never  get  a  look  in. ' ' 

"There's  this  lawyer  in  Pasadena,"  Jennie  suggested. 
"He  seems  to  be  a  convenient  sort  of  person." 


TUB  BETTER  HALF  97 

Joe  nodded,  grinned  and  resumed  dictation. 

"  'I'm  sending  this  letter  through  my  lawyer  in  Pasa 
dena.'  Wait,  cut  that  out.  'You're  welcome  to  show  this 
letter  to  your  mother.  I  am  sending  it  through  my  law 
yer  in  Pasadena  only  in  order  to  make  sure  that  you  really 
get  it  and  that  you  have  a  chance  to  decide  the  question 
for  yourself.  I  think  that,  being  nineteen  years  old,  you 
are  entitled  to  decide  it  that  way,  if  you  want  to.  I  am 
also  sending  him  a  check  for  a  thousand  dollars,  with  in 
structions  to  pay  you  as  much  as  you  want  of  it  for 
making  the  journey  with.'  ' 

"That's  two  or  three  times  as  much  as  she'll  need," 
Jennie  objected. 

' '  I  know  it  is, ' '  he  said.  ' '  That 's  the  only  way  I  've  got 
of  showing  her  I'm  not  a  piker.  She'll  take  what  she  wants 
and  he'll  pay  his  bill  out  of  the  rest."  He  went  on  with 
the  letter. 

' '  '  I  am  hoping,  before  you  come,  to  get  hold  of  a  photo 
graph  of  you,  so  that  I  will  know  whom  to  be  looking  for 
when  I  meet  the  train.  But  I  have  an  idea  that  I  shall 
know  anyway.  I  am  not  sending  you  a  photograph  of 
myself  for  fear  it  might  frighten  you.  But  I  am  not 
really  so  bad  as  I  look.  Perhaps  you  don't  know  I  am 
fifty  years  old,  five  years  older  than  your  mother.  I 
honestly  believe  you  will  never  be  sorry  for  having  given 
me  a  chance  to  show  you  that  I  can  be 

"  'Your  loving  father.' 

"Write  it  out  long-hand,  will  you,  Jennie?  Then  I'll 
copy  it  and  put  it  in  the  mail  to-night." 

It  wasn't  until  she  had  finished  this  task  that  anything 
more  was  said  between  them.  As  she  concluded  it,  she 
remarked,  "That's  a  clever  letter,  Joe.  But  I  wish  ..." 

She  broke  off  there  with  a  resolute  shake  of  the  head, 
came  over  to  where  he  was  standing  and  took  him  im 
pulsively  by  the  shoulders.  "I  wish  you  luck,  anyhow," 
she  went  on.  "I  hope  it  works.  I  hope  she  makes  you 
happy. ' ' 

Clearly,  he  was  startled  by  the  caress.     She  had  never 


done  anything  just  like  that  to  him  before.  He  didn't 
respond  to  it  with  any  gesture  of  his  own,  but  his  voice, 
when  he  spoke,  had  real  emotion  in  it. 

"God,  Jennie!  If  I  had  had  the  luck  to  marry  you 
twenty  years  ago,"  he  said. — "Well,  what  are  you  grin 
ning  at?" 

For  she  'd  instantly  stepped  away  from  him  at  that,  and 
the  quality  of  her  smile  was  derisive. 

"Annabel  wasn't  the  wife  for  you,  for  a  fact,"  she  ad 
mitted.  "But  you  don't  hate  her,  even  now.  And,  oh, 
lord,  how  you  would  have  hated  me ! ' ' 

He  didn't  very  much  relish  this,  but  she,  having  got 
the  upper  hand  of  him  again,  pressed  the  point  home.  She 
lighted  another  cigarette  and  seated  herself  comfortably 
in  his  reading  chair,  before  she  spoke. 

"The  right  wife  for  you,"  she  said,  "would  have  to  be 
pretty,  silky,  way  up  in  the  society  game.  She  ought  to 
be  a  little  afraid  of  you,  so  that  she'd  take  care  to  keep 
you  afraid  of  her.  And  you'd  have  to  be  proud,  when 
ever  you  thought  of  it,  that  you'd  got  her." 

She  saw  this  go  home  to  him.  He  flushed  half  angrily, 
and  came  a  stride  or  two  nearer. 

"How  much  more  do  you  know?"  he  demanded. 

She  leaned  back  a  little  in  her  chair,  and  smiled  ac 
ceptance  of  his  challenge.  "You  couldn't  stand  any 
body,"  she  added,  "who  knew  you  too  well.  You'd  have 
to  be  wonderful  to  her  all  the  time,  and  mysterious.  Oh, 
I  know,  because  that's  the  way  I'd  want  a  husband,  if  I 
had  one,  to  feel  about  me." 

"All  right,"  he  said.  "You  needn't  rub  it  in  any 
more.  Look  here,  it's  half  past  ten.  You'd  better  be 
running  along  home.  I'll  telephone  Burns  to  bring  your 
car  around." 

She  was  mildly  amused  at  his  sudden  concern  for  the 
proprieties,  and  she  tried  to  tease  him  a  little  about  it, 
but  he  insisted  on  treating  the  matter  seriously. 

"I  don't  want  young  Burns  getting  any  funny  ideas  in 
his  head  about  you.  He's  welcome  to  think  what  he 


99 

pleases  about  me,  and  about  some  of  the  people  I  play 
around  with.  I  don't  care  a  damn  what  he  thinks.  But 
I  want  you  to  be  careful.  Do  you  get  that?" 

"All  right,  Boss,"  she  said,  sounding  very  meek  as  she 
rose  and  went  to  find  her  wrap.  ' '  Sure  I  get  it. ' ' 

This  final  slant  of  the  talk  recalled  her  resolution  re 
garding  the  boy,  so  while  she  and  Joe  stood  in  the  cor 
ridor  waiting  for  the  car  to  come  up,  she  told  him  she 
thought  he  ought  to  find  something  better  for  young 
Burns  to  do.  "He's  too  good  to  be  wasted  driving  ac 
tresses  home  from  parties  and  that  sort  of  thing." 

"A  little  soft  on  him,  are  you?"  Joe  asked. 

"Oh,  I  suppose  so,"  she  admitted.  "I  probably 
wouldn't  have  thought  of  it  if  he  hadn't  been  so  good- 
looking.  But  it's  true  all  the  same." 

Joe  contradicted  her,  amiably  but  flatly.  "If  he's  too 
good  for  it,"  he  went  on  to  explain,  "then  it's  just  the 
job  for  him.  He  has  good  pay  and  short  hours ;  the  whole 
day  to  himself  except  what  he  needs  to  make  up  lost  sleep 
in.  If  he  wants  to  study  or  do  anything  else  that's  worth 
while,  he  has  all  the  chance  in  the  world.  If  I  could  have 
picked  up  a  job  like  that  at  his  age,  I'd  have  blessed  my 
luck.  Of  course,  it's  true  that,  if  he  isn't  any  good,  he 
has  a  handsome  chance  to  go  to  the  devil.  But  that's  no 
concern  of  mine." 

By  now,  the  elevator  had  come  up  and  she  stepped  into 
it.  "Are  you  sure  it  isn't?"  she  asked.  "There's  some 
thing  in  the  Bible  about  the  man  who  said  he  wasn't  his 
brother's  keeper." 

"Yes,"  Joe  acknowledged,  with  a  grin.  "That  was 
Cain.  But  he  wasn't  being  blamed  for  not  having  seen 
to  it  that  Abel  didn't  eat  too  many  green  apples.  He'd 
just  murdered  his  brother  and  he  was  trying  to  establish 
an  alibi.  Didn't  I  tell  you  I  knew  the  Bible?  You  want 
to  look  it  up  before  you  spring  anything  like  that  on  me. 
Good  night." 


CHAPTER  THREE 

SILK 


AROUND  this  time  Joe  got  into  a  quarrel — not  serious, 
except  as  all  business  quarrels  are  serious — with  Gregory 
Corbett. 

Gregory  had  undertaken  for  Corbett  and  Company  the 
building  of  the  machinery  Joe  had  designed  for  the  manu 
facture  of  raw  flax.  There  was,  altogether,  quite  a  lot 
of  it.  The  straw  was  to  be  handled  directly  from  the 
farmers'  wagons  and  fed  into  a  crusher.  After  this  pre 
liminary  crushing,  it  had  to  be  spread  and  sprayed  with 
the  culture  and  conveyed  to  the  bins.  It  was  to  be  with 
drawn  from  the  bottoms  of  the  bins  after  the  retting  was 
completed,  and  put  through  the  drying,  breaking  and 
scutching  processes  necessary  to  get  it  ready  for  the  mills. 

The  machinery  was  all,  or  nearly  all,  special  work  of  a 
particularly  fussy  sort,  and  from  a  manufacturer's  point 
of  view  it  was  not  an  attractive  job.  There  were  to  be 
four  of  each  sort  of  machine  to  equip  the  four  warehouses 
which  the  company  had  contracted  for  in  the  Northwest. 
But  it  wasn't  likely  that  any  of  these  designs  would  ever 
be  put  into  production  on  a  really  large  scale. 

Standardized  production  for  an  unlimited  demand  was 
the  bright  motto  of  Corbett  and  Company.  You  didn't 
mind  how  much  time  and  money  it  took  to  get  a  thing 
right,  provided  when  you  did  get  it  right  you  could  sell 
ten  million  dollars'  worth  of  it.  There  was  no  such  pros 
pect  here.  However,  they  were  well  equipped  to  do  the 

100 


SILK  101 

work,  and,  as  a  favor  to  the  new  company — this  was  his 
honest  feeling  about  it — Gregory,  at  the  April  directors' 
meeting,  agreed  to  take  the  job.  Joe  sent  the  drawings 
to  Kiverdale  by  special  messenger  that  same  day  and 
started  for  the  Northwest  on  the  day  following. 

What  happened  is  what  always  happens  in  such  cases. 
The  Corbett  engineers  out  at  Riverdale  found  numerous 
mistakes,  or  what  they  took  to  be  mistakes,  in  Joe 's  draw 
ings,  and  saw  various  improvements,  or  what  they  con 
ceived  to  be  improvements,  on  his  designs.  And,  since  Joe 
was  not  at  hand  for  personal  consultation,  in  some  in 
stances  they  made  corrections  on  their  own  responsibility 
and  went  ahead,  and  in  others  simply  waited  for  Joe's 
return.  So  when  Joe  came  back  along  in  May  and  went 
out  to  Riverdale  to  see  how  things  were  getting  along, 
there  was  a  first-class  explosion. 

Joe  stood  by  his  drawings.  The  ''improvements"  were 
ideas  that  he  himself  had  rejected  for  good  and  sufficient 
reasons  long  ago.  The  few  ambiguities  that  there  were  in 
his  drawings  were  so  obvious  that  any  mechanical  draughts 
man  with  a  teaspoonful  of  brains  could  have  cleared  them 
up  at  sight.  The  engineers  out  at  Riverdale  were  a  pack 
of  congenital  damn  fools  and  vicious  meddlers  to  boot. 
What  they'd  left  undone  was  a  crime,  and  what  they'd 
done  was  worse,  since  it  had  simply  to  be  undone  again. 
Brown,  Corbett 's  chief  engineer,  had  to  stand  two  hours  of 
this,  and  Bailey,  the  general  manager  and  first  vice-presi 
dent,  another  hour.  All  that  saved  Gregory  was  that  he 
was  out  of  town. 

Joe  went  back,  however,  to  his  office  and  wrote  Gregory 
an  outrageous  letter — behind  Jennie  MacArthur's  back, 
since  he  knew  she  'd  tone  it  down  and  he  wanted  it  to  be  as 
insulting  as  possible.  Its  purport  was  that,  if  Corbett  and 
Company  weren't  competent  to  do  this  work,  he  proposed 
to  equip  a  shop  and  do  it  himself. 

His  object  in  all  this — for  Joe  even  in  his  tantrums  us 
ually  had  one — was  merely  to  raise  the  temperature  to  the 
steaming  point.  His  real  indictment,  unstated,  was  that 


102         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

the  Riverdale  people  had  been  fiddling  with  the  job  in  a 
perfunctory  way.  He  wanted  to  get  everybody  mad 
enough  so  that  things  would  begin  to  hum  and  the  lost 
time  could  be  made  up.  And  it  was  really  a  rush  job  by 
now,  for  it  had  got  deep  into  May  and  the  harvest  that  it 
was  so  necessary  to  be  ready  for  was  not  many  weeks 
away. 

He  was  therefore  seriously  disconcerted  to  receive,  in  the 
course  of  a  few  days,  a  coldly  polite  letter  from  Gregory 
stating  that  Corbett  and  Company  would  be  very  glad  to 
relinquish  the  contract.  All  work  upon  it  had,  by  Greg 
ory's  orders,  been  stopped.  Joe's  drawings  were  baled  up 
and  ready  for  delivery  to  any  messenger  he  might  send, 
and  he  was  welcome  to  execute  them  where  and  how  he 
pleased. 

One's  own  words  don't  make  a  pleasant  diet  for  any 
body,  but  for  Joe  to  crawl  down  and  apologize  was  almost 
impossible.  So  he  appealed,  or  attempted  to  appeal,  to- 
John  Williamson  as  a  peacemaker.  He  telephoned  John's 
office  and  was  told  he  was  out  of  town.  His  attempts  to 
learn  where  John  was  were  met  merely  by  the  information 
that  Mr.  Williamson  had  left  no  instructions  for  the  for 
warding  of  any  message  whatever.  He  expected  to  be 
back  about  the  middle  of  next  week.  Even  Rollie  Mill, 
John's  secretary,  when  Joe  identified  himself  over  the 
phone  and  explained  that  the  matter  was  urgent,  had 
nothing  more  satisfactory  than  that  to  offer.  Joe  jammed 
the  telephone  receiver  down  on  its  hook. 

This  was  to  him  one  of  the  most  exasperating  of  the 
strange  customs  of  financiers,  the  trouble  they  took  to 
make  themselves  elusive  and  inaccessible.  He  couldn't 
make  up  his  mind  whether  it  was  pure  swagger,  a  trick 
to  impress  outsiders  with  their  high-mightiness,  or  whether 
they  were  so  soft-skinned  that  they  felt  the  need  of  a  lot 
of  padding  between  themselves  and  the  urgencies  of  life. 

It  was  a  great  point  of  pride  with  Joe  that  his  own 
door  always  stood  open.  Anybody  who  wanted  to  talk 
to  him  could  walk  straight  up  to  him  and  say  his  say.  If 


SILK  103 

it  wasn't  worth  listening  to,  Joe  chucked  him  out.  And 
if  he  could  do  that,  he  believed  anybody  else  could,  who 
had  enough  real  ability  to  hold  down  his  job.  The  advan 
tage  of  it  was  that  you  really  knew  what  was  going  on, 
which  you  couldn't  know  if  you  surrounded  yourself,  like 
some  scared  lazy  Oriental  potentate,  with  a  lot  of  grand 
viziers  and  eunuchs,  all  with  their  own  fish  to  fry. 

To  this  effect  he  freed  his  mind  profanely  and  explo 
sively  to  Henry  Craven.  "Here's  an  example  of  how 
badly  it  works,"  he  went  on.  "I'm  sure  Williamson 
would  want  to  know  how  we're  being  held  up  by  Corbett's 
getting  on  his  high  horse  like  this.  These  days  we're  los 
ing  now  out  at  Riverdale  will  be  precious  as  hell  before 
the  summer's  over;  and  Williamson  could  set  it  right  in 
half  an  hour,  if  I  could  get  through  to  him." 

Henry  at  this  point  startled  him  by  producing  an  idea. 
"Violet  may  know  where  John  is,"  he  suggested.  "I  can 
call  her  up  and  see." 

Joe  was  inclined  to  stick  at  that.  "I  guess  I  wouldn't 
mix  his  wife  in  it,"  he  said  uneasily.  "We  don't  want 
to  start  anything." 

Henry  laughed  at  that  idea.  It  was  quite  likely,  he 
admitted,  that  she  wouldn't  know  enough  of  her  husband's 
whereabouts  to  do  them  any  good,  since  they  went  about 
pretty  independently  of  each  other,  but  certainly  there 'd 
be  no  harm  in  trying. 

And  within  an  hour,  quite  triumphant,  he  brought  to 
Joe's  desk  some  items  of  information.  He  had  pursued 
Violet  by  telephone  from  one  point  to  another,  and 
finally  talked  with  her.  She  knew  where  John  was,  all, 
right.  He'd  gone  on  a  fishing  excursion  with  Martin 
Whitney  up  to  Martin's  camp  in  northern  Wisconsin. 
The  name  of  the  camp,  she  thought,  was  ' '  Big  Pine  Lodge. ' ' 
It  was  a  twenty-five  mile  drive  from  the  nearest  railroad 
and  telegraph  station.  But,  unfortunately,  she  couldn't 
remember  the  name  of  the  station,  though  she'd  heard  it 
often  enough.  Frederica — this  was  Martin's  wife — was 
out  of  town,  in  the  East  somewhere,  but  his  eight-year-old 


104         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

boy,  Peter,  might  know;  somebody  at  the  Whitney  house 
would,  certainly,  or  Martin's  brother-in-law,  Rodney  Aid- 
rich,  who  went  up  there  sometimes.  But  it  took  about 
twenty-four  hours  to  get  a  telegram  through,  and  Violet 
thought  John  would  be  back  about  Tuesday,  anyhow. 

And  would  Joe  like  Henry  to  telephone  Aldrich,  or 
•would  he  do  it  himself? 

"We'll  neither  of  us  telephone,"  Joe  answered  posi 
tively.  "I  hate  like  hell  to  wait  till  Tuesday,  but  we'll  let 
it  lay  right  there  just  as  it  is.  Oh,  it's  where  she  thinks 
he  is,  all  right,  but  it  sounds  like  an  alibi  to  me.  I 
wonder,"  he  added  with  a  grin,  "if  that  isn't  the  way  the 
word  fishy  got  started." 

When  Joe,  by  appointment,  saw  John  Williamson  at  two 
o'clock  on  the  next  Wednesday  afternoon,  he  had  to  admit 
that  in  this  particular  case,  without  prejudice  to  the  gen 
eral  principle,  he  had  been  wrong.  There  was  no  doubt 
at  all  that  Williamson  had  been  fishing.  For  the  first 
fifteen  minutes,  Joe  could  do  nothing  but  listen  to  the 
banker's  summary  of  his  piscatorial  triumphs;  the  num 
ber  of  trout  taken,  the  gross  weight  of  the  catch,  the  size 
of  the  biggest  one,  the  duration  in  minutes  of  some  of  the 
mightiest  combats,  stratagems  employed  by  both  sides  and 
so  on.  He  had  had  four  wonderful  days  and  he  made  it 
plain  that  he  considered  it  an  act  of  Spartan  virtue  to 
have  come  back  to  the  grind  of  business  when  he  did.  Well, 
— and  what  was  the  row  with  Gregory  all  about,  anyway? 

Joe  couldn  't  complain  of  his  manner  of  dealing  with  the 
business,  once  he  had  brought  his  mind  around  to  it.  It 
was  likely  he'd  already  heard  Corbett's  version  of  the  af 
fair,  and  had  come  to  his  own  conclusion — probably  that 
Joe  had  made  a  damned  fool  of  himself.  But  he  betrayed 
no  feeling  of  this  sort.  Confound  him,  though,  why 
shouldn't  he,  if  that  was  what  he  thought?  They  weren't 
ladies  at  a  tea  party.  They  were  two  men  trying  to  get 
down  to  brass  tacks.  But,  after  listening  with  a  good  ap 
pearance  of  sympathy  to  Joe's  tale,  he  really  gathered  the 
thing  up  pretty  well. 


SILK  105 

"I  take  it  then,  you  never  had  any  idea  of  taking  the 
job  away  from  Corbett  and  Company,  and  never  meant 
Greg  to  think  you  had.  And  that  all  you  want  now  is  to 
have  them  go  ahead  the  way  they  started." 

Joe  nodded.  That  was  about  it.  Corbett  had  taken 
literally  a  phrase  that  had  been  meant  merely  to  jazz 
things  up  a  bit.  "Because,  damn  it,  they  weren't  getting 
started  at  all.  It's  almost  June,  now,  and  they  haven't 
started  yet.  But  we  haven't  any  alternative.  I'll  do 
anything  you  say.  If  he  wants  an  apology  to  soothe  his 
feelings,  you  can  dictate  anvthing  you  like  and  I'll  sign 
it." 

"Oh,  Corbett 's  all  right,"  the  banker  said  in  a  tone 
which  struck  Joe  as  subtly  rebuking  that  last  suggestion 
of  his.  "That  plant  out  at  Riverdale  is  his  religion,  in  a 
way,  and  criticism  of  it  makes  him  sore.  I'll  see  him  to 
day — was  going  to,  anyhow,  on  another  matter — and  I'll 
straighten  things  out." 

This  was  all  Joe  wanted,  and  he  made  a  move  to  rise 
from  his  chair  when  he  saw  that  the  financier  had  some 
thing  more  to  say,  and  sat  back  again. 

"I  should  think  that  you'd  take  things  a  bit  easier  now 
that  everything  is  going  on  the  rails; — take  time  for  a 
little  fun.  Don't  you  ever  fish?" 

There  was  a  stall-fed  idea  for  you!  "Everything  on 
the  rails!"  Let  George  do  it.  Even  the  Corbett  diffi 
culty  would  have  taken  care  of  itself.  Would  never  have 
arisen,  Williamson  evidently  thought,  if  Joe  hadn't  med 
dled. 

He  suppressed  this  line  of  thought  without  even  the 
flicker  of  a  grin  for  its  expression,  and  told  the  financier 
that  there  had  been  times  in  his  life  when  he  had  fished 
assiduously.  "I've  netted  'em,  speared  'em,  hooked  'em 
with  hooks  I've  made  myself  out  of  turkey  bones;  I've 
even  caught  'em  bare-handed.  That's  a  poacher's  trick. 
Did  you  ever  hear  of  tickling  trout?  But  I  hope  I  never 
have  to  catch  another.  I've  had  enough  of  nature  and 
the  wilds,  roughing  it,  sleeping  on  the  ground  on  the 


106         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

weather  side  of  a  camp-fire,  sitting  in  the  wet  bottom  of  a 
canoe  all  day.  You  see,  I've  done  all  that — in  earnest. 
So  now  I  want  things  smooth ;  just  as  comfortable  as  I  can 
get  them." 

"Williamson  got  the  idea.  The  man  wasn't  dull  or,  ex 
actly,  slow-witted.  It  was  just  that  he'd  never  had  enough 
experience  of  the  real  life-or-death  sort  to  know  the  feel 
of  naked  reality.  He  went  on,  good-humoredly,  to  set  right 
some  of  Joe's  misconceptions  of  the  sport  of  fishing  as 
practised  at  Martin  Whitney's  camp. 

Whitney  had  a  bully  house;  built  of  logs  but  just  as 
comfortable  as  his  house  in  town.  And  you  were  just  as 
well  looked  after.  There  was  a  big  family:  man  and 
wife,  grown  sons  and  daughters,  a  sprinkling  of  grand 
children,  who  lived  on  the  place  the  year  round  and  took 
care  of  it.  You  sent  word  you  were  coming  a  day  or  two 
ahead,  and  you  found  fires  going,  beds  made,  water  turned 
on,  everything.  The  place  was  wild,  all  right — there  were 
bear,  deer,  all  sorts  of  things  to  be  found  on  it — but  the. 
trails  were  so  well  kept  up  that  it  was  perfectly  easy  to 
go  wherever  you  liked.  And  there  was  always  a  boy  ready 
to  act  as  guide.  The  woods  and  waters  were  all  carefully 
preserved,  the  whole  place  patrolled,  and  Martin's  own 
hatcheries  had  been  going  long  enough  so  that  the  fishing 
was  practically  a  sure  thing.  You  simply  couldn't  have  a 
bad  day.  And  when  you  got  home  at  the  end  of  it,  you 
sat  down  to  a  dinner  that  they'd  be  proud  to  serve  at  the 
Blackstone;  trout,  a  roast  mallard  apiece  .  .  . 

"Wild  duck  at  this  time  of  year?"  Joe  asked.  "Where 
are  the  game  wardens  in  these  parts?  Or  are  they  afraid 
of  as  big  a  man  as  Whitney?" 

"No,  it's  all  right,"  Williamson  insisted.  "Whitney 
breeds  them  up  there.  One  of  the  boys  on  the  place 
started  doing  it  just  for  a  stunt,  but  Whitney  saw  the 
value  of  the  idea  and  regularly  went  in  for  it.  They've 
got  a  big  enclosure — have  to  keep  their  wings  clipped,  of 
course,  and  feed  them  the  right  sort  of  stuff; — I  think 
they  taste  better,  for  a  fact,  than  the  wild  mallards. ' ' 


SILK  107 

Stall-fed,  by  God — even  the  wild  ducks!  Joe  didn't 
say  it  aloud,  but  the  thought  jolted  a  laugh  out  of  him. 

"Oh,  I  know  it  sounds  funny,"  said  Williamson  (he 
didn't  though;  at  least  he  didn't  know  why),  "but  it's  a 
great  idea  all  the  same.  The  point  is,  you  have  them  when 
you  want  'em." 

"Well,  that's  an  important  point,  all  right,"  Joe  re 
marked,  getting  out  of  his  chair.  "I  wish  you'd  rub  it 
into  Corbett  until  he  appreciates  it,  too.  I  used  the 
wrong  words  in  my  letter  to  him,  and  I'm  willing  to  take 
'em  back.  But  the  sense  of  that  letter  was  right  and  I 
don't  take  it  back  for  a  minute.  It'll  make  an  enormous 
difference  whether  we  have  that  machinery  ready  when 
we  want  it  or  not,  and  that's  up  to  him.  It  can  be  done, 
even  now,  but  he'll  have  to  forget  some  of  his  dignity  and 
start  a  sweat." 

The  banker  had  stayed  in  his  chair  and  now,  for  a 
minute  before  he  answered,  he  drummed  thoughtfully  with 
h]s  fingers  upon  the  desk.  "Look  here,  Greer,"  he  said 
at  last.  "I've  known  Gregory  Corbett  a  long  time — 
always,  you  may  say.  I  knew  his  grandfather.  I  think 
you've  got  the  idea  that  he's  a  pompous  ass.  At  least 
that  he's  acted  that  way  about  this.  Well,  he  isn't. 
You've  got  him  wrong.  He's  a  damned  able  fellow.  If 
you  really  sell  him  a  proposition,  get  him  enthusiastic  over 
it,  he 's  a  whirlwind.  But  if  you  get  him  sore,  he 's  a  bull 
head.  You'll  have  to  get  together  with  him  on  this  if  the 
thing  is  going  to  work." 

"He's  put  his  own  money  into  it,"  Joe  observed. 
"Can't  he  see  where  his  own  interest  lies?" 

"That  isn't  enough,"  the  banker  insisted.  "After  all, 
he  isn't  in  so  very  deep.  But  if  you  and  he  got 
together  in  a  friendly  way  over  it  ...  I  was  just  think 
ing.  Have  you  ever  done  any  trap-shooting?  Clay 
pigeons,  you  know.  He  and  I  shoot  a  few  frames  almost 
every  Sunday  morning.  We  both  get  up  early  and  he 
comes  over  and  lias  breakfast  with  me,  and  then  we  go 
out  to  the  traps  and  see  what  sort  of  an  eye  we've  got. 


108         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Put  a  quarter  a  bird  on  it  just  to  make  it  amusing. — Why 
don't  you  drive  up,  next  Sunday,  and  join  us?" 

It  was  touch  and  go,  for  a  matter  of  seconds,  whether 
Joe  wouldn't  tell  him  to  go  to  hell  and  take  his  clay  pig 
eons  with  him.  Was  it  worth  any  real  man 's  while,  trying 
to  work  in  harness  with  a  fudging,  trifling  lot  like  this? 
With  their  pretended  sports,  catching  stall-fed  fish,  shoot 
ing  clay  birds !  Pretended  gambling  to  keep  them  amused ! 
Twenty-five  cents  a  bird — to  millionaires !  And  having  to 
be  coddled  into  a  good  temper  before  they  'd  attend  to  what 
was  their  own  business! 

It  was,  Joe  decided  afterward,  a  matter  of  pure  chance 
that  tipped  the  beam.  He  had,  instinctively,  turned 
away  from  the  banker  in  that  first  moment  of  exaspera 
tion,  and  what  came  under  his  eye  was  a  framed  chalk 
drawing  hanging  alone  on  the  wall,  a  portrait  by  Helleu  of 
a  young  girl.  Joe  didn't  really  look  at  it  until  the  finan 
cier,  glancing  round  to  learn  why  he  didn't  answer,  saw 
where  his  gaze  was  fixed. 

"That's  my  daughter,"  he  said.  "They  tell  me  it  isn't 
as  good,  artistically,  as  another  he  did  of  her,  but  it  looks 
like  her,  all  right.  It  did,  anyhow,  two  years  ago  when  it 
was  done." 

It  was  beautiful,  Joe  thought,  and  he  said  so,  his  mood 
and  intent  changing  with  the  suddenness  of  an  alternating 
current  as  he  spoke.  When  Beatrice  came  (he  felt  sure 
she  would  come,  though  he'd  heard  nothing  as  yet,  either 
from  her  or  from  the  lawyer),  he'd  have  a  man  as  good  as 
that  do  a  picture  of  her.  And  this  girl  on  the  wall  was  the 
one  he'd  picked  out  to  be  his  girl's  friend.  A  charming 
young  thing  she  was,  too,  though  a  bit  disconcerting,  some 
how.  And  he,  with  that  damned  temper  of  his,  had  been 
on  the  point  of  wrecking  the  whole  plan,  just  when  Will 
iamson  was  making  his  first  really  friendly  advances. 
(For  it  hadn't  escaped  Joe's  attention  that  the  banker  had 
never,  up  to  now,  asked  him  to  his  house.  They  'd  lunched 
together  two  or  three  times  at  clubs  and  restaurants.) 
After  all,  he'd  gone  into  the  china  shop  of  his  own  free 
will,  hadn't  he?  Then  why  should  he  act  like  a  bull? 


SILK  109 

He  walked  over  to  Williamson,  holding  out  his  hand. 
"You're  right  all  the  way  through,"  he  said.  "I'll  try 
to  slow  down  and  take  it  a  bit  easier.  And  I'll  be  glad 
to  come  up  Sunday  morning.  "What  do  you  mean  by 
early?  Six  o'clock?" 

"Lord,  no!"  gasped  the  banker.  "Why,  we  usually 
have  breakfast  about  eight-thirty.  It  won't  matter  if 
you're  late." 

"I  won't  be,"  Joe  assured  him,  "but  I'm  likely  to  be 
hungry.  Driving  before  breakfast  always  gives  me  an 
appetite  like  a  wolf.  You'd  better  tell  me  how  to  find  the 
place,  though." 

2 

The  direct  business  result  of  the  Sunday  morning  trap- 
shooting  was  negligible.  It  was  forestalled,  indeed,  by  an 
action  of  Jennie  Mac  Arthur's.  As  soon  as  Williamson 
telephoned  that  Corbett  and  Company  would  go  ahead 
wilh  the  execution  of  the  order,  she  wrote  Gregory  an 
adroit  letter  which  she  persuaded  Joe  to  sign.  It  had  the 
look  of  a  proffered  compromise,  since  it  pointed  out  that 
the  need  for  the  more  complicated  machinery,  for  the 
processing  of  the  flax  after  it  had  been  retted,  was  much 
less  urgent  than  for  the  unloading,  crushing  and  convey 
ing  machinery,  which  if  they  were  to  avoid  heavy  losses 
must  be  ready  when  the  flax  was.  It  was  written  in  a 
perfect  imitation  of  Joe's  best  vein,  offhand,  vigorous, 
shot  with  a  gleam  of  good-humored  extravagance. 

"You're  a  wonder,  Jennie,"  Joe  said  as  he  read  it.  "I 
swear  I'll  never  do  it  again."  Write  a  letter  behind  her 
back,  he  meant.  He  had  made  that  promise  before,  as 
her  smile  reminded  him.  "I  mean  it  this  time,"  he  as 
serted,  as  he  signed  the  letter. 

It  brought  an  immediate  response  from  Corbett,  a  little 
stiff  in  its  phraseology — for  he  had  no  such  executive  of 
ficer  as  Jennie  at  his  right  hand — but  satisfactory  in  pur 
port.  The  receiving  machinery,  at  least,  \vould  be  ready 
as  soon  as  the  flax  was. 

Consequently,  when  the  two  men  met  in  John  William 
son's  gun-room,  a  mere  word  or  two  in  addition  to  a  mu- 


110         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

tually  amiable  greeting  was  all  the  business  needed.  Fur 
ther  than  that  they  were  never  likely  to  go.  Indeed, 
Gregory's  attempt  at  amends,  a  handsome  reference  to  the 
generosity  of  Joe's  letter,  rubbed  him  a  little  the  wrong 
way,  since  it  was  Jennie  who  deserved  the  credit  of  it. 

But  if  the  direct  result  of  that  Sunday  morning  excur 
sion  was  unimportant,  its  by-products  were  not.  The 
ideas  and  impressions  which  Joe  began  collecting,  from  the 
moment  he  drove  through  the  great  wrought-iron  gates 
which  guarded  John  Williamson's  estate,  produced  on 
him  a  profound  effect. 

It  was  not  Joe's  way  to  formulate  expectations,  and 
still  less  to  go  back  to  them  afterward  and  compare  them 
with  realities.  All  his  emotional  ideas  were  hazy.  His 
notions  of  the  business  life  of  a  man  like  John  Williamson 
he  had  revealed  to  Henry  Craven.  Here  was  somebody 
with  no  idea  what  the  wealth  he  had  inherited  was  for, 
laboriously  making  more  work  for  himself  by  increasing, 
year  by  year,  an  income  already  unmanageably  big. 

His  notion  of  the  domestic  life  of  a  man  like  that  was 
cut  off  the  same  piece  of  goods.  He  fancied  John  at 
home  as  the  slave  to  the  senseless  elaborations  of  his  own, 
or  his  wife's,  extravagance;  living  a  life  of  stiff,  uneasy. 
ceremony,  stifled  by  the  meaningless  assiduities  of  ser 
vants, — the  object,  on  the  whole,  of  contempt  rather  than 
envy.  He  had  got  it,  if  anywhere,  from  the  movies, 
though  he  did  not,  of  course,  take  literally  the  paranoiac 
inanities  of  the  cinemas; — no  more  than  he  took  literally 
the  comic  shrimp  in  the  colored  supplement  of  one  of  the 
Sunday  papers,  whose  millions  inspired  a  ferocious  de 
termination  in  his  wife  to  "bring  him  up"  to  grotesque 
standards  of  propriety  and  to  dissociate  him  utterly  from 
the  companions  of  his  choice.  Henry  Craven,  though,  had 
pretty  distinctly  intimated,  Joe  thought,  that  John  Will 
iamson's  wife  had  made  a  point,  during  the  early  years 
of  their  married  life,  of  bringing  up  John.  So,  though 
he  did  not  expect  to  be  affronted,  when  he  presented  him 
self  at  the  breakfast  table,  by  a  brandished  rolling-pin, 


SILK  111 

he  did  entertain,  vaguely,  the  notion  of  a  woman  elab 
orately  gowned  whose  hauteur,  equaling  that  of  her  but 
ler,  he  might  find  rather  trying. 

Up  to  the  moment  when  he  entered  the  gun-room,  there 
had  been  nothing  decisive  to  confirm  or  to  belie  his  ex 
pectations.  The  house  was  as  big  as  he  had  supposed 
it  would  be,  and  it  stood,  he  guessed,  the  better  part  of 
half  a  mile  back  from  the  road.  But  it  hadn't,  when  he 
got  inside,  at  all  the  look  of  a  hotel,  and  the  only  servant 
he  saw,  unless  one  counted  the  lodge-keeper  who'd  opened 
the  great  gate  for  him,  was  the  pleasant  young  fellow 
whom,  upon  pulling  up  at  the  carriage  door,  he  had  found 
on  the  steps  to  receive  him. 

Did  he  care  to  have  his  car  taken  into  the  garage?  It 
was  quite  all  right  where  it  stood  at  the  side  of  the  drive, 
unless  it  should  come  on  to  rain,  and  it  looked  at  last  as 
if  we  could  count  on  a  fine  morning.  The  gentleman  was 
expected  in  the  gun-room, — whither  this  friendly  guide 
now  proceeded  to  conduct  him. 

John  Williamson  in  the  gun-room  was,  it  is  hardly  too 
much  to  say,  a  revelation  to  Joe.  The  room  itself  had 
something  to  do  with  it.  It  was  comfortable  and  mascu 
line  and  shabby.  The  fender  around  the  fireplace,  a 
broad  seat  upholstered  in  red  leather,  was  scarred  by  the 
heels  of  innumerable  boots.  The  shallow  cupboards,  whose 
unglazed  walnut  doors  paneled  both  the  flanking  walls, 
had  a  look  of  use  and  of  diverse  content,  if  one  were  to 
judge  by  the  different  sorts  of  keyholes  one  saw.  And  the 
keys,  all  the  important  little  flat  keys,  would  be  in  John's 
pocket,  guarding — it  would  be  fun  to  know  what  different 
sorts  of  treasures.  The  room  opened  straight  outdoors 
on  the  ground  level.  The  door  stood  open,  as  did  the 
casement  windows,  and  let  in,  undefaced  by  any  woven 
wire  screening,  great  splashes  of  sunshine  upon  the  floor. 
"Without,  the  turf  as  thick  and  short  and  firm  as  the  pile  of 
a  carpet  came  right  up  to  the  stone  sill. 

Joe  knew  without  any  telling,  in  his  first  glance  through 
that  open  door,  that  everything  he  could  see  belonged  to 


112         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Williamson.  It  struck  him  quite  convincingly,  though  he 
didn't  stop  to  rationalize  it,  that  nothing  of  his  own,  or 
hardly  anything,  belonged  to  him  in  quite  so  ample  and 
secure  a  sense.  And  from  the  moment  when  the  banker, 
hearing  him  come  in  and  emerging  from  his  Sunday  news 
paper  (he  was  rather  shabbily  dressed  in  a  pair  of  old 
knickerbockers  and  a  soiled  white  sweater,  and  it  was  per 
fectly  apparent  that  the  opinion  of  no  human  being  upon 
the  propriety  of  his  costume  would  interest  him  in  the 
least),  rose  and  came  over  to  greet  him,  Joe  began  to  per 
ceive  that  Williamson  here  in  his  place — his  fortress,  if  you 
liked — was  a  different  man ;  friendlier,  perhaps,  on  the  sur 
face — that  was  just  hospitality — but  underneath  more  ar 
rogant.  And,  perhaps,  formidable  ?  The  question  rang  in 
Joe's  mind  like  a  tap  on  a  big  bell.  He  answered  it  with 
a  grin.  All  the  better  if  the  stall-fed  could  show  a  little 
redder  blood  than  he  had  credited  them  with. 

Corbett,  who  came  walking  across  the  lawn  to  the  gun 
room  door  just  about  then,  had  a  new  look  about  him, 
too.  Joe  had  never  seen  him  before  except  in  business 
clothes.  He  was  dressed  now  in  knickerbockers,  a  sport 
shirt  and  a  sleeveless  shooting  vest,  unbuttoned,  and  the 
sight  of  his  neck  and  forearms  gave  Joe  something  more 
to  think  about.  He  wasn't  used  to  having  to  concede  an 
unquestionable  physical  superiority  to  those  in  whose  com 
pany  he  found  himself.  He'd  often  thought  of  Gregory 
as  some  one  out  of  whom  it  would  be  fun  to  take  a  fall. 
Here  was  a  misconception  thoroughly  corrected.  The 
man's  strength  was  evidently  prodigious. 

Joe  said  as  he  shook  hands  with  him,  "I'd  never  have 
written  that  letter  if  I'd  seen  you  first  with  your  coat 
off." 

"I  might  have  kept  my  shirt  on,  though,"  Corbett  re 
plied,  and  blinked  as  if  in  surprise  at  the  unforeseen  wit 
ticism.  He  added,  seriously  and  a  little  stiffly,  his  appre 
ciation  of  Joe's  second  letter,  and  said  he  didn't  believe 
there 'd  be  anything  more  to  complain  of  in  Corbett  and 
Company's  execution  of  the  order. 


SILK  113 

Business  wasn't  mentioned  again  all  the  morning.  Dur 
ing  the  intermissions  of  a  casual  but  excellent  breakfast, 
the  talk  divided  itself  equally  between  professional  base 
ball  which,  it  seemed,  had  long  been  a  hobby  of  William 
son,  and  the  important  question  of  the  moment,  namely, 
which  of  the  three  or  four  available  guns  Joe  had  better 
take  out  to  the  traps  with  him. 

They  weren't  at  all  put  off  by  Joe's  rather  pointed  un 
concern.  Indeed,  after  he  had  confessed  that  he  had  never 
fired  a  shotgun  in  his  life,  and  couldn't  see  that  it  mat 
tered  a  damn  what  sort  of  lock,  stock  or  barrel  the  thing 
had,  they  took  their  responsibilities  all  the  more  seriously. 
He  might,  he  protested,  have  been  going  out  after  a  tiger. 

At  the  traps,  he  watched  derisively  while  Williamson 
scored  twenty-two  hits  out  of  twenty-five  chances  and 
Corbett,  twenty-four.  It  was  almost  too  absurd,  he 
thought,  to  be  credible.  You  stood  at  a  known  range, 
eighteen  yards.  You  held  your  gun  at  your  shoulder. 
You  said,  ' '  Pull ! "  to  the  keeper,  or  whatever  they  called 
him.  He  pulled,  and  the  skimming  target  flew  off  at  one 
of  three  predetermined  angles,  in  rotation!  And  you 
blazed  away  at  it  with  a  shell  containing  two  'ounces  of 
bird-shot !  His  own  failure  to  score  more  than  six  out  of  a 
possible  twenty-five  didn't  raise  his  opinion  of  the  sport, 
so  very  much,  either.  When  he  had  finished  his  frame, 
he  laid  his  gun  in  the  rack  and  told  the  servant  that  he'd 
manage  the  lever  while  the  man  went  to  his  motor  and 
fetched  an  automatic  pistol  and  a  case  of  cartridges  which 
he'd  find  in  the  left  front  door  pocket. 

His  impression  was  that  both  the  other  men  regarded 
this  proposal,  to  pot  at  clay  pigeons  with  a  pistol,  as  in 
decorous  but  nevertheless  amusing,  and  it  was  with  a  boy 
ish  air  of  guilt  that  they  drew  up,  when  his  turn  came,  to 
see  what  sort  of  luck  he  had.  He  moved  up  to  a  five-yard 
range  and  told  the  man  at  the  lever  to  pull  whenever  he 
liked.  "Fool  me  if  you  can,"  he  added.  "Get  the  idea?" 

This  was,  of  course,  an  idea  that  no  well-trained  servant 
could  possibly  execute,  so,  after  a  trial  or  two,  Williamson 


114         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

relieved  him.  Joe  managed  to  smash  eight  out  of  the 
frame,  which  both  the  others  agreed  was  extraordinary 
shooting.  Williamson  taking  his  turn,  with  Joe  at  the 
lever,  got  none.  As  he  turned  away,  he  offered  the  pistol 
to  Corbett.  "This  man's  supposed  to  be  the  best  revolver 
shot  in  Lake  County,"  he  explained.  "He'll  give  you  a 
better  run  for  your  money."  But  Corbett  thought  he 
wouldn't  try  it  that  morning.  "Throw  me  off  my  draw," 
he  explained.  "Looks  no  end  of  fun,  though." 

Joe,  blazing  away  again  in  his  turn,  was  startled  by  a 
new  voice — a  woman's,  speaking  from  close  by. 

"Is  this  Chateau  Thierry,  or  what?" 

He  spun  round  and  looked,  and  his  first  thought  was 
that  this  was  the  girl  whose  portrait,  in  chalk,  he'd  seen 
in  Williamson's  office.  The  next  moment,  she  cut  cleanly 
through  the  jumbled  situation — created  by  Corbett 's 
greeting  her  as  Violet  and  asking  why  she  was  up  at  this 
hour  of  the  morning,  and  some  superfluous  sort  of  answer 
to  her  question  attempted  by  Williamson — by  holding  out 
a  decisive  hand  to  Joe  and  saying: 

"I  know  you're  Mr.  Greer.     I'm  Mrs.  Williamson." 

She  wasn't  excessively  small,  but  his  first  impression  of 
her,  nevertheless,  was  as  something  jewel-like,  finished 
out  to  an  incredible  perfection  in  detail,  and,  despite  the 
rough  texture  and  non-fitting  cut  of  the  sport  suit  she 
affected,  he  felt  a  sensuous  silkiness  about  her  which  these 
contrasts  perhaps  heightened.  And  she  was  Williamson's 
wife.  Good  lord!  She  couldn't  be  the  mother  of  that 
girl  in  the  picture,  could  she!  The  resemblance  seemed  to 
prove  it.  It  needed  her  laugh  and  the  withdrawal,  not 
brusk  though,  of  her  hand,  to  remind  him  that  he  had 
been  staring. 

"I  suppose  you'd  like  to  shoot  me  for  interrupting," 
she  said;  "but  you've  no  idea  how — weird  it  was  to  hear 
a  rattle  like  this  coming  from  the  traps.  Golf  and  bil 
liards  and  bridge  are  solemn  enough,  but  they're  nothing 
compared  to  these  Sunday  morning  clay  pigeons.  This 
looks  like  fun.  D  'you  suppose  I  could  hit  one  ? ' ' 


SILK  115 

So  she  stayed,  and  took  her  turn;  actually  managed  to 
smash  two  targets.  It  wasn  't  long  before  they  'd  shot  away 
all  the  cartridges.  By  that  time,  Joe  had  become  aware 
that  the  other  two  men  were  getting  remote;  not  hostile, 
he  thought,  but  he  couldn't  be  sure.  Did  they  resent  a 
certain  lack  of  ceremony  between  him  and  the  woman? 
Wasn't  she  supposed  to  have  appeared  at  all?  And 
shouldn't  he,  according  to  their  ideas,  have  met  her  half 
way?  But  she,  sensing  the  new  atmosphere  herself,  spoke 
out  about  it. 

"These  two  men,"  she  said  to  Joe,  "are  feeling  ashamed 
of  themselves,  now  that  I've  caught  them  playing  hookey, 
and  they're  getting  ready  to  be  very  severe  to  make  up 
for  it.  Do  you  want  to  stay  with  them  and  shoot,  properly, 
or  do  you  want  to  come  and  walk  with  me?  You  haven't 
seen  the  place,  have  you?" 

3 

Violet  Williamson,  during  the  two  hours  or  so  that  were 
left  of  that  Sunday  morning,  not  so  much  stirred  Joe, 
though  she  did  that,  too,  as  stirred  him  up ;  agitated  a  lot 
of  thoroughly  precipitated  ideas  which  had  been  lying  un 
disturbed  in  the  bottom  of  his  mind  for  a  long  time,  and  set 
them  afloat.  She  belonged,  he  decided,  in  a  category  the 
existence  of  which  he'd  never  suspected;  she  thrilled  him 
with  a  sense  of  discovery. 

The  women  he'd  known,  aside  from  those  who,  like 
Bunny  and  Yvette,  frankly  made  a  living  out  of  their  sex 
appeal,  and  from  the  other  lot,  the  more  or  less  de-femi 
nized  ones,  worker  bees, — a  type  which  Jennie  MacArthur 
presented  herself  as  an  interesting  variant  from, — the 
women  he'd  known  aside  from  these  (who  were  alike  in 
the  important  respect  that  they  had  to  look  out  for  them 
selves)  were  two  other  sorts,  alike  in  the  fact  that  they 
didn't.  There  were  the  "good"  women,  as  he'd  called 
them  in  talking  to  Jennie  of  Annabel  and  her  mother,  in 
nocent,  narrow-minded,  domestic,  to  whom  he  conceded  at 
least  an  academic  admiration  and  respect;  and  another 
sort  for  whom  he  felt  nothing  but  a  profound  contempt. 


116         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  BIS  DAUGHTER 

These  were  the  wives  of  the  prosperous  nomad  class  to 
which  Joe,  in  default  of  anything  better,  had  socially  at 
tached  himself.  The  men  were  well  enough.  They  were 
usually  good  salesmen  of  bonds  or  real  estate  or  insurance 
or  automobiles.  They  could  tell  good  stories  and  often 
had  a  real  gift  for  repartee.  They,  with  their  wives,  at 
tended  first  nights;  dined  a  good  deal  at  the  restaurants; 
frequented  the  socially  broader-minded  sort  of  country 
clubs,  the  women  sticking  pretty  close  to  the  verandas 
and  the  cardrooms.  They  lived  in  expensive  apartments 
but  they  were  always  on  the  move.  These  women  were, 
he  thought,  broadly  speaking,  no  good.  They  dawdled  and 
shopped;  they  went  to  the  movies;  they  weren't  good 
enough  housekeepers  to  keep  servants;  they  read  the 
lighter  sort  of  current  fiction,  and  ate  chocolate  creams 
when  they  weren't  in  a  panic  about  getting  fat;  they 
didn't  have  any  children  if  they  could  help  it.  The  source 
of  most  of  their  wit  and,  indeed,  a  good  part  of  their  con 
versation,  in  companies  where  both  sexes  were  present,  was 
the  supposed  tendency  toward  infidelity  on  the  part  of 
all  married  persons  and  the  jealousy  of  the  aggrieved 
member  of  the  partnership.  It  was  thought  to  be  a  great 
joke  to  split  couples  when  going  anywhere  in  taxicabs. 
All  the  teasing  and  ragging  was  about  this  sort  of  thing. 
Every  now  and  then,  one  of  these  jokes  got  taken  seriously 
and  flared  up  into  a  furious  but  half-histrionic  quarrel. 
Respectable  kept  women,  that's  what  they  were.  And 
their  weak  but  febrile  clutch  upon  respectability  was  the 
thing  about  them  which  irritated  Joe  the  worst. 

Without  having  given  very  much -thought  to  the  matter, 
he  had  assumed  that  the  wives  of  his  new  stall-fed  asso 
ciates  were  cut  off  pretty  much  the  same  piece  of  goods. 
They'd  be  better  kept,  of  course;  they  were  out  of  the 
precarious  zone  of  ups-and-downs ;  their  luxuries  would 
be  a  realer  thing,  not  a  matter  of.  carefully  contrived  ap 
pearances.  But  that  they  were,  in  fiber,  as  soft  and  slack 
and  irresolute,  he'd  never  seriously  doubted. 

Violet  began  uprooting  these  preconceptions  in  the  first 
moments  of  their  encounter.  That  the  mother  of  a  grown 


SILK  117 

girl  could  look  like  that,  and  move  around  like  that,  was 
an  amazing  phenomenon,  to  begin  with.  Her  taking  the 
automatic,  with  no  ornamental  feminine  flutters  or  squeals, 
and  bagging  a  couple  of  targets  was  unexpected  too,  as  was 
her  matter-of-fact  way,  a  few  minutes  later,  of  carrying 
him  off  from  her  husband.  She  did  this  without  a  smile, 
with  no  parade  of  tactics,  without  the  remotest  reference, 
by  glance  or  gesture,  to  the  possibility  that  John  "William 
son  mightn  't  like  to  have  his  wife  stroll  off  with  a  stranger 
whom  he  certainly  hadn  't  taken  the  trouble  to  introduce  to 
her.  She  got  away  with  it  perfectly.  The  other  two  men, 
as  they  resumed  their  guns,  merely  nodded  pleasantly  to 
him  and  said  they'd  see  him  later.  They  didn't  again 
that  morning,  as  it  happened. 

"You  don't  want  to  go  around  looking  at  the  Holsteins, 
do  you?"  she  asked,  as  they  paused  a  moment  at  a  low 
gate.  "Or  the  Chester  Whites,  or  the  Black  Anconas?" 
She  added,  as  he  hesitated,  "If  it  were  John  taking  you 
around,  you'd  have  to,  of  course,  but  not  with  me." 

He  said  he  guessed  not,  and  they  didn't  go  through  the 
gate. 

He  got  the  idea  that  she  had  some  other  objective,  for 
there  was  nothing  aimless  about  the  way  she  guided  him, 
and  the  pace  was,  considering  that  she  was  a  woman  and 
the  morning  warm,  .brisk.  She  knew  how  to  walk  and 
was  properly  shod  and  clad  for  it.  Her  homespun  skirt 
was  short  and  light,  and  outlined,  with  agreeable  frank 
ness,  her  straight,  slender  legs. 

She  let  him  see  at  once  that  she  had  been  inquiring  about 
him.  Apparently  she'd  started  Henry  Craven  retailing 
some  of  his  jungle  stories.  He  tried  to  follow  this  lead, 
but  it  went  against  the  current  of  his  thoughts  and  he 
didn't  make  much  of  it;  felt  rather  tongue-tied,  somehow, 
and  a  bit  resentful,  suspecting  that  she  wanted  him  to  ex 
hibit  himself  as  a  curiosity,  the  wilder  and  queerer  the 
better.  A  rather  audacious  speculation  of  hers  about  the 
number  of  cannibal  princesses  that  he  might  have  made 
love  to  didn't  help  matters  either. 

Joe  found  no  amusement  in  skating  on  the  thin  ice  of 


118         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

innuendo  about  sex.  He  had  a  repertory  of  bawdy  stories 
and  there  was  a  sort  of  woman  in  the  world  whom  he 
occasionally  told  them  to,  but  none  of  that  sort  were  the 
wives  of  men  he  knew.  He  couldn't  be  sure  whether  John 
Williamson's  wife  had  meant  to  invite  him  in  that  way,  or 
not;  her  manner  didn't  suggest  it.  She  didn't  bridle, 
either,  at  the  snub  his  silence  administered,  though  she 
now  fell  silent,  too.  She'd  flushed  a  little,  but  this  might 
be  due  to  the  pace  they  were  making  and  the  warmth  of 
the  morning.  There  was  something  Diana-like,  he  thought, 
about  her  fineness  and  freedom  of  movement.  She'd 
make  a  wonderful  model  for  one  of  Troubetskoy's  figur 
ines.  They  were  going  up  a  gentle  acclivity,  now,  through 
a  grove  of  big  trees,  she  a  pace  or  two  ahead,  and  the 
dapple  of  sunlight  and  shade  upon  her  heightened  his  im 
pression  of  the  huntress. 

When  they  emerged  from  the  grove,  they  were  upon 
the  crest  of  the  low  ridge,  and  wrhat  fell  away  before  them 
was  a  wide  expanse  of  lawn.  The  house  was  in  full  view, 
presenting  its  terrace  and  its  long  facade  of  Georgian 
windows.  There  was  a  swimming  pool,  its  curb  gleaming 
white  like  marble  and  the  water  in  it,  for  some  reason  he 
didn't  understand,  showing  turquoise.  There  were  ten 
nis  courts  marked  out  in  startling  white  upon  the*green  of 
the  lawn,  and  two  great  umbrellas  of  orange  and  white. 
A  garden,  tumultuous  in  color,  was  just  beyond. 

Joe  stopped  and  stood  at  gaze.  ' '  I  'm  glad  you  brought 
me  up  here,"  he  said.  He  was  aware  she  wasn't  looking 
at  it  herself,  but  was  watching  him  instead. 

"Yes,  this  is  the  place  to  see  it  from,"  she  said  indif 
ferently. 

There  was  a  hickory  seat  built  round  the  trunk  of  a  giant 
outlier  of  the  grove,  and  with  him  she  moved  over  to  it. 
As  soon  as  he  was  seated,  however,  she  got  up  and,  un 
ceremoniously,  sat  upon  the  grass. 

"You  like  it  to  look  at,"  she  said,  "for  a  minute,  like 
this,  on  a  bright  spring  Sunday  morning.  And  next 
month  it  will  be  even  jollier,  when  the  kids  are  all  getting 


SILK  119 

home  from  school.  The  pool  there  will  be  alive  with  them, 
and  the  courts.  The  color's  gorgeous,  then,  with  the 
swimming  things  they  wear  and  white  arms  and  legs  all 
over  the  place.  It's  a  good  show.  You  must  come  up 
and  see  it." 

He  began  saying  he'd  like  to,  but  she  hadn't  yet  got  to 
•what  was  in  her  mind,  and,  with  a  bare  nod,  went  on: 

"Keally,  though,  except  as  a  show,  to  look  at  now  and 
then,  doesn't  it  bore  you  frantic?  The  whole  thing,  I 
mean, — our  sort  of  thing,  the  sort  of  people  we  are?" 

For  a  random  shot,  this  came  close  home.  He  remem 
bered  his  state  of  mind,  three  or  four  days  ago,  when 
Williamson  had  invited  him  to  come  up  here ;  the  opinions 
that  would  have  come  steaming  out  of  him,  if  he  hadn't 
managed,  just  in  time,  to  clamp  down  the  lid.  That  Will 
iamson's  wife  should  have  asked  him  such  a  question  was 
amazing. 

"I  don't  know  any  of  you  very  well,"  he  answered, 
lamely.  ''I'm  not  bored  now." 

"Oh,  I  suppose  it's  too  much  to  expect  you  to  talk  out," 
she  said  discontentedly.  "Especially  after  I've  been  rub 
bing  you  the  wrong  way,  as  we  came  along  just  now."  She 
overrode  his  gesture  of  protest.  "Oh,  yes,  I  did.  You 
thought  I  was  just  asking  silly  questions,  like  a  girl  meeting 
her  first  actor.  It  wasn  't  that  exactly,  but  it  sounded  like 
it." 

He  tried  to  tell  her  it  hadn't  struck  him  like  that.  His 
jungle  experience  was  a  long  way  back,  and  this  morning 
it  had  seemed  especially  remote.  He  hadn't  been  able  to 
get  into  the  swing  of  it. 

She  nodded  amiably.  "Some  time  you'll  feel  like  it," 
she  said,  "and  then  you'll  tell  me." 

The  implication  that  there  were  going  to  be  times,  ample 
unlimited  times,  for  talking  together  like  this,  stirred  him, 
half  frightened  him.  He  recalled,  illogically,  an  observa 
tion  of  Jennie  MacArthur.  "The  right  wife  for  you," 
she'd  said,  "would  have  to  be  silky,  way  up  in  the  society 
game.  You'd  have  to  be  proud,  whenever  you  thought 


120         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

of  it,  that  you  'd  got  her. ' '  He  felt  the  blood  pringling  in 
his  forehead.  She  wasn't  looking  at  him,  though;  she'd 
gone  on,  thoughtfully,  talking.  He  listened  as  well  as  he 
could  for  looking  at  her.  She'd  taken  off  her  hat  and 
tossed  it  on  the  grass,  and,  with  its  obstructing  brim  out 
of  the  way,  he  could  see,  from  the  elevation  of  his  bench, 
the  perfect  turn  of  her  throat,  and  the  pearly  translucence 
of  her  skin  where  it  was  shaded  by  the  thin  blouse  she 
wore. 

"You  keep  going,"  she  said,  "from  the  time  you're 
quite  small,  thinking  that  life's  going  to  open  out,  some 
how,  like  a  door.  And  then  some  day  you  wake  up  and 
realize  you're  thirty-five  or  so,  and  that  it  doesn't  mean 
to  open  out,  at  all;  there  isn't  any  door — not  to  the  thing 
you're  in.  And  then  you  hear  about  somebody  who's 
never  been  shut  up,  in  anything;  somebody  the  whole 
world's  always  been  open  to.  And  you  try  to  get  people 
to  tell  you  about  him,  people  like  John  who  can't  under 
stand  him  one  little  bit,  themselves,  and  Henry  and  Mar 
garet  Craven — Margaret's  funny  about  you. — You  won 
der  what  that  kind  of  freedom  feels  like.  I  should  think 
you'd  feel,"  she  looked  around  at  him  suddenly,  "with  us, 
you  know,  like  a  big  moose,  or  something,  that  finds  itself 
shut  up  in  our  pasture  with  the  Holsteins." 

She'd  startled  him  again,  this  time  into  a  laugh.  It 
didn't  occur  to  him  as  a  possibility  that  her  cousin  Henry 
might  have  quoted  that  phrase  of  his  about  stall-fed 
people  to  her. 

He  saw  that  his  laugh  had  annoyed  her ;  more  or  less  he 
understood  why:  he  hadn't  "played  up." 

"I  guess  freedom's  always  a  thing  we  think  some  one 
else  has,"  he  commented.  "It  made  me  laugh  that  you 
should  have  thought  of  me  like  that.  The  two  really  dif 
ferent  kinds  of  people  in  the  world  are  the  ones  who  have 
been  hungry  and  the  ones  who  haven't — I  don't  mean  diet 
ing,  I  mean  against  their  will." 

That  brought  her  gaze  round  to  him,  a  look  of  clear 
wonder  in  her  eyes.  "Have  you"?"  she  asked. 


SILK  121 

It  launched  him,  that  wondering  look,  into  a  vein  of 
biography  which  would  have  afforded  Jennie  Mac- 
Arthur  a  grin.  "You'd  have  to  be  wonderful  to  her  all 
the  time,  and  mysterious,"  Jennie  had  remarked,  con 
structing  that  hypothetical  wife  for  him.  Perhaps  if  Joe 
had  thought  of  that  just  now,  he  might  have  grinned,  too, 
invisibly.  But  he  didn't  think  of  it;  he  wasn't  quite 
conscious  why  he  took  the  line  he  did.  It  was  by  mere  in 
stinct  that  he  fed  the.  appetite  for  wonder  he  saw  in  her. 
He  didn't  invent  anything,  at  that, — or  not  much.  It  was 
only  that  the  picture  he  showed  her  was  as  heavily  cross- 
lighted  as  a  bit  of  stage  scenery. 

It  was  the  story  of  Ishmael,  the  son  of  Hagar,  that  he 
told  her, —  "his  hand  against  every  man  and  every  man's 
hand  against  him."  He'd  found  his  real  jungle,  he  said, 
in  the  streets  and  alleys,  the  lumber-camps  and  the  foundry 
yards,  of  civilized  society.  He'd  never  belonged  to  any 
union,  any  organization  of  any  sort.  He'd  got  most  of  his 
jobs  back  in  those  years — the  troubled,  panicky,  early  'nine 
ties — working  as  a  strike-breaker.  He  showed  her  what  it 
meant  to  load  pig-iron  all  day,  a  day  being  an  eternity  of 
ten  hours;  and  then,  before  he  could  regain  what  shelter 
he  called  home,  to  have  to  evade,  or  outfight,  the  pickets, 
— to  slink  along  in  the  shadows,  alert  for  ambuscades, 
ready  at  any  moment  to  fight  or  flee  for  his  life. 

She  said  very  little  while  the  tale  went  on,  but  that 
extra,  jungle  sense  of  his  told  him  that  she  was  completely 
plastic  to  it.  She  didn't  look  at  him  much, — sat  staring 
off  into  vacancy;  and  this  permitted  his  gaze  to  feed  upon 
her  at  will.  He  devoured  every  line  and  contour  of  her. 
He  could  see  the  faint  pulse  at  the  base  of  her  throat;  he 
watched  her  breathe.  It  was  thus,  at  last,  that  he  lost  the 
thread  of  his  story  and  stopped. 

She  allowed  this  silence  to  lie  unbroken  between  them 
for  so  long  that  he  was  upon  the  point  of  some  banal 
apology  for  having  talked  so  much  about  himself,  when  at 
last  she  spoke. 

"Well,  I  bet  you're  glad  it  all  happened.    Because  it 


122         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

never  beat  you  down.  You  never  got  meek  and  resigned, 
and  you  never  turned  Socialist,  wanting  to  divide  every 
thing  up,  or  anything  silly  like  that.  I  suppose  you  didn  't 
want  it  divided  up ;  you  wanted  it  all  for  yourself.  So 
you  went  off  to  the  jungle,  the  real  jungle,  and  made  your 
fortune  somehow,  and  then  you  came  back  and  showed 
them." 

He  didn't  correct  this  chronological  misconception  of 
hers;  the  picture  as  she  saw  it  accorded  better  with  her 
mood.  "It  wasn't  much  of  a  fortune  I  made  down  there," 
he  qualified.  "Twenty-seven  hundred  dollars  that  I  got 
for  some  curios  I  brought  out  with  me  in  a  bag  and  sold 
to  a  museum." 

She  frustrated  a  little  touch  of  drama  he'd  prepared,  by 
not  asking  him  what  the  curios  were.  She  got  reluctantly 
to  her  feet.  "You'll  have  to  tell  me  about  that  next  time," 
she  said.  "I  know  it  would  be  like  the  Arabian  Nights, 
and  if  I  let  you  get  started  again,  I'll  sit  here  listening  all 
day.  I've  got  to  drive  over  to  the  Stannards'  at  Lake 
Geneva  for  lunch,  with  John,  and  I  suspect  I'm  horribly 
late,  now. — Oh,  that  doesn't  matter,"  she  went  on,  across 
his  attempt  to  express  contrition.  "He  probably  won't 
speak  to  me  all  the  way,  but  that'll  only  give  me  more 
time  to  think  about  the  things  you've  been  telling  me." 

They  were  walking,  now,  she  setting  a  very  leisurely 
pace,  down  the  slope  toward  the  house. 

"What  I  can't  get  over,"  she  remarked,  "is  the  places 
you  must  have  been,  the  things  you  must  have  seen !  I  've 
never  been  in  any  place  more  exciting  than  St.  Moritz  or 
Paris." 

"Well,  you've  got  it  on  me  there,"  he  said.  "I've 
never  been  to  any  of  those  places." 

She  stopped  to  stare  at  him.  "You  mean  you've  never 
been  to  Europe  at  all  ? "  she  asked. 

He  shook  his  head.  "Never  had  time.  I'll  get  around 
to  it  some  day,  of  course." 

She  laughed.  "I  was  just  thinking,"  she  explained, 
"that  I'd  like  to  be  there  when  you  do.  Like  to  go  along 


SILK  123 

and  show  it  to  you;  see  how  it — took  you.  Oh,  the  gal 
leries  and  the  cathedrals  and  such,  of  course;  but  other 
things,  too:  Longchamp  and  Henley,  and  the  Easter 
"Week  bull  fights  in  Madrid." 

"That's  what  Sorolla  said,"  he  told  her. 

She  stopped  again  to  stare.    ' '  Sorolla  ? ' ' 

He  nodded.  "Just  what  you  said — that  he'd  like  to 
see  how  I  took  it,  the  bull-ring  and  the  Prado  and  all." 

"When  did  you  know  Sorolla?"  she  demanded.  Her 
laugh  seemed  to  be  directed  at  her  own  astonishment. 

"When  he  was  here.  I  bought  a  picture  of  his,  one 
of  those  seashore  things.  I'd  like  you  to  see  it  sometime. 
It's  better  than  the  one  they've  got  at  the  Institute.  He 
painted  a  portrait  of  me,  and  then  he  wouldn't  let  me 
have  it.  Took  it  back  to  Spain  with  him.  We  got  pretty 
well  acquainted.  I  can  talk  Spanish,  you  see,  better  than 
English ;  politer  anyhow. ' ' 

She  digested  this  in  silence  until  they  got  to  where  his 
car  was  standing  in  the  drive.  Even  then,  she  made  no 
move  to  leave  him. 

"I'd  commandeer  you,"  she  said,  "and  take  you  over 
to  the  Stannards',  except  that  you'd  be  so  bored  you'd 
never  forgive  me." 

He  thought  it  best  not  to  insist  that  he  wouldn  't  be.  He 
offered  the  excuse  of  work  to  do,  and,  getting  into  his 
car,  seated  himself  at  the  wheel.  "You  will  come  to  see 
the  Sorolla  sometime?"  he  asked.  "Come  to  dinner,  you 
and  your  husband?" 

She  accepted  this  invitation  a  little  absently.  Then 
promptly  corrected  her  manner  and  told  him,  with  polite 
enthusiasm,  she  'd  love  to.  Still  she  lingered  for  a  moment 
beside  his  car,  her  elbows  on  the  door,  one  foot  on  the 
running-board.  She  asked  him  suddenly  what  he  was 
smiling  at. 

"Speaking  of  bull  fights  reminded  me,  I  fought  a  bull 
once  myself.  In  the  public  square  at  Quito.  I  jumped 
over  the  barrier  on  a  bet  a  girl  had  just  made  with  me." 

' '  Oh,  go  away ! ' '  she  cried,  releasing  the  car  at  last  and 


124         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

stepping  back.  ' '  But  come  again.  Soon.  [And  telephone 
me  when  you  want  us  for  the  dinner.  John  might  for 
get." 

Joe  had  lied  to  Violet  in  one  minor  particular ;  it  hadn  't 
been,  directly,  her  reference  to  the  bull  fights  in  Madrid 
that  had  reminded  him  of  the  bull  he  fought  at  Quito,  but 
her  own  attitude,  during  their  moment  of  parting,  while 
she  lingered  beside  his  car.  That  had  brought  back  the 
young  senora  he'd  made  the  bet  with.  His  first  serious 
love-affair  had  been  with  her.  Eighteen,  he  must  have 
been,  or  thereabouts;  she  couldn't  have  been  more  than  a 
year  or  two  older.  And  her  husband  had  been  much  the 
same  sort  of  stall-fed  hidalgo — in  Ecuador — as  Williamson. 
There  had  been,  he  remembered,  about  that  Castilian  girl, 
the  same  quality  of  silkiness.  And  the  same  cool  in 
solence.  She'd  regarded  him  as  a  barbarian — laughed  at 
his  rudimentary  Spanish  and  at  his  Northern  manners. 
But  she'd  come  to  him  just  the  same.  It  was  queer  how 
vividly  he  remembered  her.  He  hadn't  thought  of  her  in 
years. 

He  had  driven  all  the  way  back  to  town,  at  a  speed 
reckless  of  the  prowling  Sunday  motor  cop,  before  it  oc 
curred  to  him  that  he  hadn't  told  Violet  a  word  about 
Beatrice — on  whose  sole  account  he  had  accepted  John 
[Williamson's  invitation  in  the  first  place.  He  didn't  go 
on  to  admit  that,  from  the  moment  of  Violet's  appearance 
at  the  traps,  he'd  forgotten  all  about  his  daughter.  "What 
he  decided  was  that  it  was  just  as  well  he'd  waited  until 
he  knew  for  sure  the  child  was  coming. 


CHAPTER  FOUR 

THE   CUB 


IT  was  not  on  the  cards  that  Joe  should  forget  about 
his  daughter  for  long.  Within  a  day  or  two  of  his  Sunday 
morning  adventure  at  Lake  Forest,  he  got  a  telegram  from 
the  serviceable  lawyer  at  Pasadena,  which  brought  Beat 
rice  vividly  into  the  foreground  of  his  thoughts. 

"Your  daughter  plans  leaving  at  once,"  it  read. 
"Wants  entire  thousand  dollars.  Is  this  OK?" 

Joe  went  off  at  half-cock  over  this.  His  letter  had  suc 
ceeded  beyond  his  hopes.  The  girl  was  ready  to  come  to 
him,  at  once !  And  now  the  whole  thing  was  jeopardized 
by  the  timidity  of  a  piking,  small-town  lawyer,  afraid  to 
let  go  the  money  that  he  had  expected  would  pay  his  bill. 
If  the  child  wanted  the  whole  thousand  to  make  her  feel 
secure  in  setting  out  upon  so  vast  an  enterprise  as  this, 
she  should  have  it.  It  had  been  precisely  to  give  her  that 
feeling  of  security,  that  Joe  had  offered  it.  The  poor 
kid,  since  she  was  born,  had  probably  never  traveled  far 
ther  than  Yosemite  or  San  Diego;  probably  had  never 
spent  a  night  on  a  Pullman.  Chicago  and  Timbuctoo 
would  seem  about  equally  distant  to  her.  And  here  was 
this  fool  lawyer  making  difficulties,  asking  for  instruc 
tions.  He  should  have  some,  that  he'd  remember  per 
haps  till  next  time!  So  there  was  a  good  deal  of  pepper 
in  the  telegram  which  Joe  despatched  in  reply. 

"Instructions  carried  out.  Have  written,"  the  lawyer 
wired  the  next  day,  and  Joe  began  looking  out  for  a  tele- 

125 


126         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

gram  from  Beatrice  herself.  None  came,  and  the  mis 
giving  deepened  in  his  mind  that  he'd  have  done  well  to 
give  a  second  thought  to  that  hasty  conclusion  of  his  and, 
perhaps,  to  consult  Jennie  MacArthur  about  it.  He  did 
not  mention  the  matter  to  her  until  the  lawyer's  letter 
came  in,  just  within  the  week.  That  really  frightened  him. 
It  began  with  the  startling  assumption  that  the  girl  was 
already  in  Chicago  with  her  father. 

"Your  daughter  has,  I  trust,  by  this  time  told  you,  in 
substance,  the  manner  in  which  the  instructions  in  your 
letter  of  the  thirteenth  instant  have  been  carried  out. 

"I  was  not  able,  until  two  days  ago,  to  get  into  confi 
dential  communication  with  her  without  incurring  the 
risk  of  my  intention  becoming  known  in  other  quarters. 
She  came,  however,  by  appointment,  to  my  office,  yes 
terday  about  four  o'clock,  and  read  your  letter  to  her  in 
my  presence.  She  was  greatly  excited  by  it,  so  much  so, 
indeed,  that  she  found  herself  unable  to  read  it,  and  put 
it  into  my  hands  to  read  to  her.  She  declared  her  in 
tention  of  starting  at  once  and  even  demurred  to  return 
ing  to  her  home  for  the  night,  professing  a  fear  that  some 
thing  might  happen  to  prevent  her  going  altogether.  She 
also  demanded  the  entire  thousand  dollars  in  cash,  which 
I  took  to  be  contrary  to  the  expectation  expressed  in  your 
instructions.  I  ventured  to  point  out  to  her  your  im 
plied  wish  that  she  consult,  or  at  least  inform,  her  mother 
in  the  matter;  but  this,  with  the  utmost  vehemence,  she 
refused  to  do.  I  then  took  refuge  in  the  assertion  of  my 
inability  to  provide  a  thousand  dollars  in  cash  until  the 
banks  should  open  the  next  morning,  and  to  this  enforced 
delay  she  consented. 

"I  telegraphed  you  at  once  and  your  reply,  as  you  no 
doubt  remember,  left  me  no  discretion.  So  when  she 
called  at  my  office,  at  eleven  o'clock  this  morning,  I  paid 
her  the  thousand  dollars  in  currency.  I  must  now  con 
sider  my  responsibility  in  the  matter  discharged. 

"One  minor  matter  remains,  however,  to  be  mentioned. 
She  brought  me,  this  morning,  a  photograph  of  herself, 
which  she  inscribed  to  you  at  my  desk,  asking  me  at  the 
same  time  to  mail  it  to  you.  I  pointed  out  to  her  that 


THE  CUB  127 

since  she  was  leaving  for  Chicago  that  day,  as  I  under 
stood  it  to  be  her  intention  to  do,  the  photograph  would 
reach  you  some  days  sooner  if  she  carried  it  herself.  She 
insisted,  nevertheless,  and  quite  without  explanation,  that 
I  mail  it  to  you  as  she  requested,  which  I  am  doing  under 
separate  cover. 

"She  declined  my  offers  to  procure  her  ticket  and  ac 
commodation,  and  to  have  her  accompanied  to  the  train. 
I  trust  I  am  unwarranted  in  making  the  assumption  that 
she  had  some  other  destination  than  Chicago,  immediately 
at  least,  in  mind." 

The  letter  disturbed  Joe  so  profoundly  that,  when  Jen 
nie  had  read  it  (he  had  called  her  into  the  private  office 
for  the  purpose,  the  moment  she  arrived  the  next  morning), 
he  made  no  attempt  to  shift  from  his  own  shoulders  the 
blame  for  what  he  feared  had  happened.  Indeed,  when 
Jennie  said  of  the  lawyer,  "He  ought  to  have  known  bet 
ter  than  let  her  go  like  that,"  Joe  contradicted  her. 

"  I  'm  the  only  damn  fool  in  this  business, ' '  he  said.  ' '  I 
wired  him  in  so  many  words  to  tend  to  his.  The  only 
question  now  is,  what's  to  be  done.  "Whether  to  wire  him 
to  try  to  have  her  found,  or  to  go  out  myself  on  the  next 
train." 

"Neither  would  do  any  good,"  Jennie  reflected.  "The 
only  thing  you  can  do  for  the  present  is  to  telegraph  your 
wife  what  you've  done,  or  else  have  the  lawyer  talk  to 
her.  She  may  have  some  clue  where  the  girl's  gone,  or 
she  may  be  frantic  without  one;  but  in  either  case  it's  up 
to  you  to  tell  her." 

Joe  mopped  the  sweat  from  his  forehead.  "Yes,"  he 
admitted  gravely,  "I  suppose  it  is."  And  this  humility 
was  so  unlike  him  that  Jennie  set  about  finding  what 
comfort  she  could  for  him. 

It  wasn't  likely  the  girl  had  come  to  any  actual  harm; 
at  least  not  to  anything  she  herself  would  regard  in  that 
light.  Joe's  thousand  dollars  had  probably  come  down 
from  heaven  to  make  possible  the  realization  of  some 
dream  of  hers,  and  she'd  simply  snatched  at  it.  She'd 


128         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

write  to  him  when  she  got  around  to  it.  It  might  be  a 
silly  dream,  of  course;  she  might  have  gone  no  farther 
than  Hollywood  for  a  plunge  into  the  movies,  or  eloped 
with  some  boy  lover  of  hers.  Anyhow,  Joe  had  accom 
plished  part  of  his  purpose :  Annabel 's  lemon-grower  was 
deprived  of  the  chance,  which  in  prospect  had  so  in 
furiated  Joe,  of  being  a  father  to  the  girl. 

But,  even  in  this  aspect  of  the  affair,  Joe  found  no  con 
solation,  and  for  the  rest,  he  protested  that  Jennie  had  it 
doped  out  all  wrong.  An  innocent  simple-minded  little 
thing,  such  as  Annabel's  daughter  would  have  been  brought 
up  to  be,  wouldn't  be  capable  of  thinking  of  going  into  the 
movies;  and  as  for  a  schoolboy  lover  .  .  .  He  didn't  see 
how  Jennie  could  entertain  an  idea  like  that.  Why,  the 
kid  was  only  nineteen ! 

"You  were  down  in  the  jungle  by  then,"  Jennie  re 
marked. 

"But,  damn  it,"  Joe  cried,  "she's  a  girl!" 

But  when  the  photograph  came  to  hand,  as  it  did  a  day 
or  two  later,  he  was  forced  to  admit  the  possibility  that 
Jennie  was  nearer  right  than  he.  The  force  of  the  emotion 
that  seized  him  when  he  found  the  package  on  his  hall 
table  and  realized  what  it  must  contain,  literally  turned 
him  a  bit  giddy.  He  ripped  away  the  wrappings  with 
hands  that  shook,  but,  before  he  opened  the  big  brown 
mount,  he  carried  it  into  the  next  room  and  sat  down. 

It  was  with  clear  incredulity  that  he  stared,  for  the  first 
minute,  at  the  pictured  woman  it  revealed.  For  it  was 
as  a  woman  that  he  first  saw  her.  She  was  looking 
straight  at  him,  very  insolently,  from  under  her  heavy 
black  lashes,  her  head  somewhat  tilted  back  for  the  purpose. 
Her  black  hair  lost  itself  in  the  shadows  of  the  dark 
ground.  It  was  what  photographers  speak  of  as  a  "  fancy ' ' 
head,  her  naked  shoulders  and  bosom  emerging  from  a 
vignette  of  enveloping  tulle. 

It  wasn't  until  later  that  he  perceived  the  pathetic  pre 
tense  there  was  about  all  this;  that  the  insolence,  the 
shamelessness,  the  world-weary  sophistication,  were,  after 


THE  CUB  129 

all,  the  mere  imposture  of  a  child.  She  had  inscribed  her- 
self  across  one  of  the  bare  shoulders,  with  a  fine  swing  of 
bravado:  "Your  devoted  daughter,  Beatrice."  And  un 
derneath,  she'd  written  in  smaller  characters:  "Not  a 
wise  enough  child  to  know  her  own  father.  Not  yet,  but 
soon. ' ' 

He  spent  the  whole  evening  alone  with  it  in  a  tangle  of 
violently  contradictory  emotions.  He  was  angry  and  a 
little  ashamed;  he  was  quite  inordinately  proud;  he  was 
furiously  jealous.  For  whom  had  she  had  that  picture 
taken?  Not  for  him,  he  knew;  the  time  had  been  too 
short.  He  felt  sure  it  was  one  the  girl's  mother  had 
never  seen,  let  alone  authorized.  No,  she'd  had  it  taken 
for  some  man, — some  movie  actor,  some  hotel  clerk. 
There 'd  be  plenty  of  masculine  admiration  for  a  girl  who 
looked  like  that.  She  was  quite  extravagantly  pretty.  It 
was  a  short  broad  boyish  face,  with  a  wide  expressive 
mouth  and  a  real  nose.  There  wasn't  the  slightest  look  of 
Annabel  about  her.  She  was  his,  every  drop  of  her.  She 
was  nineteen  years  old,  and  this  outrageous  thing,  with  its 
vampire  stare  and  its  pert  inscription  (he  hadn't  missed  the 
irony  of  that  scrawled  "devoted"),  was  his  first  communi 
cation,  his  first  knowledge  of  her.  The  Beatrice  he'd 
sentimentalized  over  all  these  years,  the  old-fashioned  bou 
quet  with  the  paper  frill  about  it  that  he'd  told  Jennie 
about,  was  blown  away  like  a  wraith.  This  girl  was  flesh 
of  his  flesh. 

And,  in  all  likelihood,  he'd  lost  her! 

"When  Jennie  saw  the  photograph,  she  laughed.  "Any 
one  who'd  ever  seen  you  would  know  who  her  father  was, 
without  any  telling." 

An  actual  physical  likeness  hadn't  struck  Joe,  and  he 
professed  himself  skeptical  about  it. 

"No,  she's  you  all  over,"  Jennie  insisted.  "I'll  leave 
it  to  anybody.  Let  me  show  it  to  Henry;  see  what  he 
says. ' ' 

But  Joe,  instead  of  handing  it  over  to  her,  rewrapped 
it  thoughtfully  in  the  paper  from  which  he'd  just  taken 


130         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

it.  "I  didn't  think  I'd  say  anything  about  her  to  Henry," 
he  explained,  "until  I  knew  for  sure  whether  she  was 
coming,  or  not." 

"She'll  come,"  Jennie  said  confidently.  "She  says  so, 
right  there  on  the  photograph.  And  then, — well,  of 
course,  she'd  come  anyway.  I  guess  you'll  find  she's  like 
you  in  a  good  deal  more  than  looks.  She's  probably  an 
explorer,  just  like  you.  Willing  to  take  a  chance  to  find 
out  about  things, — especially  anything  as  exciting  as  a 
father  she's  never  seen  and  they've  told  her  she  mustn't 
ask  about.  She 's  having  some  little  fling  of  her  own  first, 
but  she'll  come." 

;  "But  what  kind  of  a  fling,  that's  the  point,"  Joe  put  in 
somberly.  "Damn  it,  Jennie!  If  she's  come  to  harm 
with  that  fool  thousand  dollars  ..." 

"She  hasn't,"  Jennie  assured  him.  "She  won't  com 
mit  herself  to  anything,  or  anybody, — not  even  a  movie 
actor — till  she's  found  out  what  7/ow're  like.  Any  more 
than  you  would,  yourself.  I  tell  you  she's  like  you." 

"Well,  I  hope  you're  right,"  he  said.  "It'll  simplify 
things  quite  a  bit,  if  you  are." 

' '  Simplify  ? "  She  looked  at  him  thoughtfully.  ' '  WeU, 
perhaps.  If  you  can  manage  not  to  forget  it 's  true.  That 
must  be  a  pretty  hard  sort  of  thing  to  remember,  though." 

He  didn't  see  just  what  she  meant  by  that,  but  he  for 
bore  to  ask.  Her  confidence  that  the  girl  would,  ultimately, 
turn  up,  intact  and  unencumbered  with  a  movie-actor  or 
bell-hop  husband,  really  comforted  him,  and  enabled  him 
to  dismiss  the  worst  of  the  worry  about  Beatrice  from  his 
mind,  even  though  reverberations  of  the  emotional  earth 
quake  in  Pasadena  reached  him  daily  in  the  form  of 
telegrams. 

He  did  mention  to  Henry  Craven,  by  way  of  preparing 
the  ground,  that  he  was  more  than  half  expecting  a  visit 
soon  from  his  daughter.  He  added  no  explanations,  and 
Henry,  though  visibly  bulging  with  questions,  was  too 
polite  to  ask  them.  To  Henry's  sister,  Margaret,  a  few 
days  later,  he  was  a  little  more  communicative. 


THE  CUB  131 

The  occasion  for  this  was  a  supper  party,  instead  of 
the  dinner  he'd  originally  planned,  for  the  Williamsons. 
A  small  and,  to  Joe's  ideas,  a  rather  tame  supper  party, 
though  it  included  a  few  stage  people  of  the  better  sort; 
Jimmy  "Wallace,  a  dramatic  critic ;  and  a  bachelor  portrait 
painter,  named  Burton.  The  others  were  John  "William 
son  and  his  wife,  and  Henry  and  Margaret  Craven.  The 
brother  and  sister  happened  to  be  the  first  arrivals.  It 
was  not  their  first  visit  to  Joe's  apartment, — in  Henry's 
case,  not  by  several.  He,  on  coming  into  the  drawing- 
room,  sat  down  at  once,  unceremoniously,  at  the  piano,  and 
he  continued  amusing  himself  with  it,  in  a  fragmentary, 
meditative  sort  of  way,  after  Margaret  had  returned  from 
the  room  designated  by  Joe — his  own — where  she  had  left 
her  wraps. 

"I've  just  been  looking  at  a  photograph,"  she  said.  "I 
wondered  .  .  . " 

"Yes,  that's  Beatrice,"  Joe  answered  the  unstated  ques 
tion.  "I  meant  Henry  to  tell  you.  I'm  expecting  her  in 
a  few  days.  I've  not  seen  her  in — years.  You  see,  my 
wife's  been  living  in  California  for  a  long  time,  and  the 
girl  has  been  out  there  with  her." 

Margaret  smiled.  "I  hadn't  even  known,"  she  said, 
"that  you  were  married." 

Joe  looked  at  her  squarely.  "I  shan't  be  very  much 
longer, ' '  he  told  her.  ' '  She 's  getting  a  divorce.  Means  to 
marry  again,  I  understand.  Well,  it's  right  enough  she 
should.  We  split  up  years  ago." 

"It  must  be  delightful,"  Margaret  said  evenly,  "to  have 
a  grown-up  daughter  coming  to  make  one  a  visit.  Es 
pecially  a — delicious  young  thing  like  that." 

"She's  younger  than  she  looks  in  that  picture,"  Joe 
commented  soberly.  "Only  nineteen.  Of  course  she'll  be 
sort  of  a  cat  in  a  strange  garret,  at  first.  I  thought  I'd 
like  to  bring  her  around  to  see  you,  if  you'd  let  me." 

For  no  longer  than  a  breath,  his  appeal  remained  tin- 
answered.  Then,  with  a  fully  adequate  cordiality,  Mar 
garet  said  she'd  love  to  know  the  girl. 


132         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Late  that  night,  after  the  party — a  thoroughly  success 
ful  one — had  broken  up,  as  Joe  was  undressing,  he  observed 
that  the  photograph,  which  he  had  left  standing  open  on 
his  dressing-table,  had  been  closed  and  laid  down,  the  flap 
of  the  mount  even  tucked  under  it  to  keep  it  from  spring 
ing.  He  wondered  if  Margaret  Craven  had  done  that,  and, 
if  so,  why.  It  might,  of  course,  have  been  a  sheer  inad 
vertence.  "Williamson's  wife  hadn't  spoken  of  the  pic 
ture,  though  he'd  had  quite  a  long  talk  with  her.  Ap 
parently,  neither  of  the  Cravens  had  mentioned  Beatrice 
to  her. 

2 

"No  telegrams  to-day?"  For  more  than  a  week  it  had 
been  Joe's  first  question  of  the  butler  as  the  man  opened 
the  door  for  him  upon  his  daily  return  from  the  office, 
despite  a  standing  order  that  any  wire  that  came  to  the 
apartment  during  the  day  should  be  telephoned  on  to 
wherever  he  was. 

To-night,  Anson  said,  as  always,  "No  telegram,  sir,"  but 
the  inflection  of  the  phrase  was  different,  and  Joe  de 
manded  sharply,  "Well,  what?" 

' '  The  young  lady  herself  has  arrived.     Miss  Greer,  sir. ' ' 

"Arrived?     In  town?     Where  is  she  now?" 

"In  the  library,  I  believe,  sir." 

Joe  found  that  he  was  trembling.  The  man  had  taken 
his  hat.  There  was  no  reason  why  he  shouldn't  go  straight 
into  the  library,  but  he  hesitated.  ' '  When  did  she  come  ? ' ' 
he  asked. 

"Just  after  noon,  sir.     Around  two  o'clock,  I  think." 

"Two  o'clock!"  Joe  echoed.  "Why  the  devil  wasn't  I 
told  of  it?" 

"Miss  Greer  wished  me  not  to  disturb  you,  sir.  She 
said  she  wished  a  little  time  to  get  settled."  He  paused, 
but  Joe  was  speechless,  so,  after  a  moment,  he  went  on. 
' '  I  assisted  in  unpacking  her  trunk.  She  had  it  sent  down 
to  the  store-room  about  an  hour  ago."  He  added,  a  little 
anxiously:  "She  took  the  blue  room.  I  trust  it's  all 
right,  sir." 


THE  CUB  133 

"Of  course  it's  all  right,"  Joe  answered  curtly.  "She's 
my  daughter,  you  understand?  Going  to  live  here  with 
me,  for  the  present  anyhow.  That's  all,"  he  concluded. 
"You  may  go."  He  waited  where  he  was  until  the  man 
had  gone  through  the  service  door.  Then,  after  a  steady 
ing  moment,  alone,  he  made  his  way  to  the  library. 

She  must  have  heard  him  talking  to  Anson,  but  she  gave 
no  overt  sign  of  being  aware  of  his  approach.  She  sat 
facing  him,  one  of  the  evening  papers  open  in  both  hands 
so  that  it  hid  her  like  a  curtain.  It  occurred  to  Joe  that 
one  didn't  hold  a  paper  quite  so  rigidly  as  that  when  one 
was  reading  it. 

"Is  that  you,  Beatrice T"  he  asked.  He  had  halted 
without  coming  very  close  to  her. 

At  his  voice,  she  flung  the  paper  aside  and  sprang  to 
her  feet.  "Hello,  dad!"  she  cried.  She  almost  managed 
the  air  of  one  greeting  a  familiar  at  the  end  of  a  day's 
separation.  Her  voice,  like  Joe's,  had  a  startling  reso 
nance  and  a  wide  inflexional  swing.  She  added,  "I  sup 
pose  that  is  you. ' '  She  had  tried,  as  before,  to  say  it  cas 
ually,  pertly  even,  but  the  wire  edge  in  her  voice  betrayed 
that  she  was  frightened. 

He  had  expected  that.  What  surprised  him  was  that 
he  was  frightened,  too.  Almost  for  the  first  time  in  his 
life,  he  felt  he  had  to  lock  his  teeth  to  prevent  them  from 
chattering.  He  turned  his  look  abruptly  away  from  her 
but  still,  as  he  gazed  blankly  out  the  window,  he  could 
see  the  picture  of  her.  She'd  rouged  her  cheeks  a  little 
and  a  sudden  pallor  had  left  the  two  spots,  staring. — She 
was  his.  His  daughter!  She'd  come,  incredibly,  to  live 
with  him.  She  'd  unpacked  her  trunk  and  sent  it  down  to 
the  store-room.  She'd  dressed  as  a  woman  dresses  when 
she  is  securely  at  home,  in  the  sort  of  thing  they  callec^  he 
thought,  a  tea-gown.  And  white  silk  stockings,  and  black 
satin  slippers,  high-heeled  with  straps.  He'd  find  her 
like  that,  every  day — unless  he  frightened  her  off. 

"Yes,"  he  said,  "we're  here  together,  at  last."  Then, 
in  order  not  to  stop  talking,  he  went  on :  "You  gave  me  a 


JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

great  scare.  It's  two  weeks  since  that  lawyer  telegraphed 
you'd  left." 

"You  got  my  picture,  though,"  she  reminded  him.  "I 
wrote  on  it  I  was  coming.  I  had  to  go  to  San  Francisco 
first  to  get  some  clothes.  Mother  never  would  let  me  have 
a  thing  I  was  fit  to  be  seen  in.  I  thought  I'd  better  make 
a  good  impression,  so  you  wouldn't  send  me  back  on  the 
next  train."  She  gave  a  nervous  laugh.  "Have  I?  Do 
you  like  me?" 

Somehow  he  couldn't  look  round  at  her,  but  he  nodded 
and  said,  "Yes. — I  must  wire  your  mother  you've  come. 
She's  been  in  a  terrible  state  about  you." 

She  had  begun  coming  toward  him,  but  now  she  stopped. 
"I  guess  you're  still  mad  at  me,"  she  remarked,  "for 
having  kept  you  waiting." 

At  this  he  turned  to  her.  "I  kept  you  waiting  longer 
than  that,"  he  said.  "So  what  forgiving  there  is,  you'll 
have  to  do." 

"Well,  then,"  she  answered,  "let's  kiss  and  make  up. 
I  suppose  that's  the  next  thing  to  do."  She  uttered  that 
same  nervous  laugh  again  as  she  came  to  meet  him,  and, 
when  he  took  her  in  his  hands,  he  saw  that  she  winced. 
Her  head  went  back  like  a  frightened  animal's. 

Instantly  he  let  her  go,  and  stepped  back.  ""We'll  let 
that  stand  over  while  you're  getting  used  to  me,"  he  told 
her. 

Blood  surged  up  into  her  face,  and  it  was  with  a  shrug 
she  turned  away.  "Suit  yourself  about  that,"  she  said. 

The  paralysis  which  had  been  upon  him  lifted.  His 
thought  spoke  itself,  naturally,  in  words.  "My  dear,  the 
only  woman  who  ever  kissed  me  without  wanting  to  was 
your  mother.  I'm  not  going  to  have  that  handed  on  to 
you.  You're  going  to  like  me  some  day,  and  when  you 
do  you'll  come  and  kiss  me  without  having  to  stiffen  your 
back." 

At  that,  she  smiled  round  a  little  more  spontaneously 
upon  him.  "I'm  going  to  like  it  here,  all  right,"  she 
said. 


THE  CUB  135 

And  with  this  encouragement,  partial  as  it  was  (for  it 
was  it,  he  noted,  that  she'd  prophesied  she'd  like,  rather 
than  him),  he  took  matters  into  his  own  hands.  Had  she 
said  anything  to  Anson  about  dinner, — about  anything 
she'd  specially  like?  Was  she  tired  after  her  long  jour 
ney?  If  not,  what  would  she  say  to  their  dining  down 
town, — at  the  Blackstone,  perhaps?  And  seeing  a  show 
afterward,  by  way  of  making  it  a  party  ? 

Fine!  That's  what  they'd  do,  then.  She  could  dress 
or  not,  just  as  she  liked.  Evening  dress,  he  meant.  If 
she  didn't,  any  sort  of  street  frock  would  do.  All  right, 
then,  he'd  put  on  a  dinner  jacket  himself,  and  they'd  do 
the  thing  right.  He  was  afraid,  though,  if  she  was  going 
to  need  any  help  they'd  have  to  call  in  the  cook. 

He  had  rung  for  the  butler  while  he  talked,  and  now, 
as  the  man  appeared,  he  said,  "We're  dining  down-town, 
Anson.  Ask  your  wife  if  she  '11  come  in  a  few  minutes  and 
help  Miss  Greer  with  her  hooks.  You'd  better  pick  up  a 
maid  to-morrow.  We'll  be  needing  one,  now.  Tell  Burns 
to  be  around  with  the  closed  car  at  ten  minutes  to  seven. 
And  get  me  the  theater  agency  on  the  phone.  I'll  talk  to 
them  myself ;  want  to  see  wrhat  they  've  got. ' ' 

The  girl,  as  he  meant  her  to,  had  stood  drinking  this  in 
with  wide  incredulous  eyes, — the  eyes  of  a  Cinderella,  en 
tranced. 

Well,  that  wasn  't  the  beginning  of  it.  He  'd  make  it  up 
to  her  for  all  those  nineteen  meager  years.  Just  let  her 
*vrait  and  see. 

She  drew  herself  up  as  he  finished  his  instructions,  and 
ventured,  on  her  own  account,  a  tentatively  regal  little 
nod  of  dismissal  as  the  butler  turned  to  go.  She  flushed, 
seeing  Joe  had  caught  her  at  it,  and  herself  moved  away 
to  the  door.  "I'll  hurry,"  she  said. 

"You  needn't,"  he  called  jovially  after  her.  "The 
party  can't  begin  without  you." 

To  the  extent  that  he  was  capable  of  cool  reflection,  he 
decided,  when  the  evening  was  over,  that  it  had  gone  well, 
—as  well  as  he  could  have  hoped.  Its  minor  failures  were 


136         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

all  attributable  to  him.  He  shouldn't  have  suggested 
evening  dress  to  her,  in  the  first  place.  She  had  dressed 
up,  thinking  to  please  him,  most  likely,  in  a  costume  that 
must  have  been  the  climax  of  that  fevered  week's  shop 
ping  in  San  Francisco.  The  gown  was  of  a  sort  Joe 
knew  well  by  experience,  and  the  association  made  him 
wince ;  the  sort  a  girl  buys  when  she  wants  to  make  forty- 
dollars  look  like  four  hundred.  Extreme  in  cut,  and  with 
the  effect  of  being  violent  in  color,  though  it  was  really 
an  off -shade  of  rose.  She'd  matched  it  more  or  less,  too, 
in  stockings  and  slippers,  and  with  an  unfortunate  hat 
which  he  hadn't  dared  suggest  she  leave  behind.  He  had 
dined  and  supped  at  restaurants  uncounted  times  with 
girls  who  were  dressed  with  that  same  general  tone  and 
had  enjoyed  the  effect  himself  as  well  as  the  echo  it  pro 
duced  from  all  and  sundry  who  chanced  to  sit  within  its 
range.  The  sting  of  this  ineluctable  comparison  got 
through  his  skin.  He'd  had  to  maintain  an  appearance 
of  calm  in  the  face  of  two  or  three  furious  gusts  of  anger 
which  had  swept  over  him  when  he'd  seen  people  smile. 
But  he  didn't  think  she'd  been  aware  of  any  of  that. 
She'd  flushed  with  pleasure  over  his  enthusiastic  praise 
of  the  costume,  and  there 'd  been  nothing  about  her  man 
ner  since  to  indicate  disillusionment. 

The  cocktails,  too,  had  been  a  mistake.  A  pure  inad 
vertence  they  were.  The  captain  had  come  over,  as  he 
always  did,  to  take  his  order  for  drinks,  and  Joe  had  com 
manded  Martinis  before  he  thought.  Then  he  came  to 
and  declined  wine.  He  didn't  suppose  she'd  ever  tasted 
anything  with  alcohol  in  it.  He  surmised  a  problem  here : 
on  the  broad  question  of  intoxicants,  what  line  ought  he 
take  with  the  girl?  She'd  be  better  off  without  them, 
of  course.  He  wasn't  going  to  begin  by  being  a  crab, 
though, — not  to-night.  The  most  he  ventured,  when  the 
glass  was  put  before  her,  was  a  suggestion  that  a  sip  or 
two  wouldn't  hurt  her  and  that  he'd  drink  up  whatever 
she  left.  She'd  made  an  impudent  face  at  him,  at  which 
he  laughed,  and  then,  with  a  good  deal  of  elaboration  of 


THE  CUB  137 

manner,  proceeded  slowly  to  drink  the  whole  thing.  He 
wondered  uneasily  whether  her  week  in  San  Francisco  had 
contributed  this  item  to  her  education;  he'd  get  a  more 
detailed  account  of  that  sojourn  from  her,  when  he  could 
without  seeming  to  pry.  Then  he  grinned  as  it  struck 
him  as  probable  that  her  school  had  been  the  movies. 

The  drink  did  go  to  her  head,  as  the  bright  glow  upon 
her  temples  betrayed;  but  the  effect  of  this  was  to  alarm 
her  a  little  and  to  put  her  rather  rigidly  on  guard.  He 
was  inclined  to  think,  looking  over  the  evening  in  re 
trospect,  that  this  might  have  been  the  obstacle  between 
them  that  he  'd  been  faintly  aware  of  from  then  on. 

Or  perhaps  it  had  been  the  play,  which  wasn't,  most 
likely,  the  happiest  possible  choice.  He'd  picked  it  partly 
because  it  was  in  the  theater  next  door  to  the  hotel ;  partly 
because  he  liked  the  charming  young  star  who  was  playing 
in  it  (she  was  a  great  friend  of  James  "Wallace).  But 
partly  too,  because  it  was  a  nice  wholesome  little  piece  with 
no  possible  harm  in  it ;  the  sort  of  thing  an  unsophisticated 
young  girl  could  appropriately  be  taken  to.  And  this 
quality  of  it  was  what  she'd  resented  a  little,  scenting 
something  patronizing  in  his  attitude.  Naturally,  anyhow, 
her  mood  hadn't  been  receptive,  to-night,  to  simplicity  in 
dotted  Swiss. 

Kiding  home  after  the  play  (for  he  hadn't  suggested 
any  further  protraction  of  the  party),  she'd  been  almost 
silent  and  a  little  aloof, — half  frightened,  perhaps,  over 
the  adventure  she'd  embarked  on.  But  he'd  gained  enor 
mously  by  forbearing  to  press  her  for  more  than  she  was 
ready  to  give.  He'd  made  no  mistake  here.  She'd  been 
braced,  he  guessed,  upon  their  return  to  the  flat,  for  some 
demand  of  confidences, — a  sentimental  summary  of  their 
first  evening  together,  a  looking  forward  to  what  their 
life  was  going  to  mean — and  his  apparently  casual  dis 
missal  of  her  to  bed  had  evidently  touched  as  well  as  sur 
prised  her.  She'd  hesitated  in  the  doorway,  as  if  half 
minded  to  come  back  into  his  arms.  If  he'd  invited  her 
by  a  gesture,  he  thought  she  would  have  come.  Well,  it 


138         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

was  better  not ;  let  her  take  her  time.  ' '  Telephone  me  at 
the  office  in  the  morning  when  you  wake  up, "  he  'd  called 
after  her. 

It  was  hours.after  she'd  gone  to  bed  before  he  even  tried 
to  sleep.  His  imagination  was  all  ablaze  with  great  pro 
jects,  cunning  plans,  and  the  center  from  which  they  all 
radiated  was  that  young  thing,  asleep  by  now,  in  there 
behind  that  unlocked  door.  She  was  his!  It  had  been 
his  act  that  created  her.  Now,  for  the  first  time  in  twenty 
years,  that  incredible  bond  between  them  had  been  ac 
knowledged  by  her  own  free  act  and  will.  She  had  come  to 
him,  adventuring  greatly,  because  he  was  her  father. 
Well,  her  trust  should  be  rewarded  a  hundred-,  a  thou 
sand-fold!  There  was  nothing  the  stall-fed  folk  of  the 
world  could  do  for  their  young  that  was  more  than  he 
would  do  for  his.  That  arrogant  security  of  theirs  he 
would  make  his  own,  in  order  to  pass  it  on  to  her.  He 
would  make  a  princess  of  her, — a  princess  in  her  own  right. 

Alternately,  with  these  luminous,  grandiose  conceptions, 
his  mind  engaged  itself  with  matters  of  minute  detail: 
how  she  could  be  dressed ;  how  taught  the  small,  irritating 
tricks  of  speech  and  manner  by  which  the  stall-fed  tagged 
themselves  and  identified  each  other.  Henry's  sister 
would  come  in  handy  here ;  she  knew  all  the  tricks,  though 
without  money  they'd  never  been  worth  much  to  her.  His 
sleep  that  night,  when  finally  it  came,  was  troubled  by 
strange  dreams.  Three  times  during  the  enlarging  hours, 
he  had  sprung  wide  awake,  and,  leaving  his  bed,  had  stolen 
down  the  passage  to  listen  for  a  moment  outside  her  door. 

At  half -past  seven  the  next  morning,  as  he  was  sitting 
down  to  breakfast,  she  amazed  him  by  coming  into  the 
dining-room.  She  was  clad  in  a  loose-sleeved  bathrobe, 
over  her  nightgown,  and  her  hair,  in  two  thick  black 
braids,  hung  over  her  shoulders.  Her  eyes  were  bright 
with  youth,  and  the  bloom  of  sleep  lay  upon  her  unpainted 
skin.  Her  greeting  was  a  mere  playful  caress  of  one  hand 
upon  his  shoulder.  Then  she  sat  down  in  the  armchair 
opposite  his,  and  made  a  great  play  of  the  domesticities  of. 


THE  CUB  139 

breakfast;  had  the  coffee  urn  and  all  the  serving  dishes 
removed  to  her  side  of  the  table. 

She  chaffed  him  brightly  while  she  served  and,  in  the 
intervals,  made  a  hearty  breakfast  of  her  o\^n.  She  made 
light  of  his  concern  that  she  should  be  up  and  about  so 
early.  She  wasn't  one  of  the  sort  who  had  to  sleep  away 
their  days.  There  was  nearly  always  something  better 
to  do  than  sleep,  she  thought,  and  certainly  her  first 
breakfast  with  her  father  was  one  of  them. 

The  meal  prolonged  itself  far  beyond  his  usual  limit  for 
breakfast,  and  the  morning  paper  lay  unregarded  on  the 
floor.  At  last,  however,  he  rose  and  said  he  must  be  off. 
She  rose,  too, — they  had  the  room  to  themselves  just  then, 
— and  for  a  moment  she  stood  before  him,  breathless  and 
a  little  flushed.  Then  she  flung  her  arms  around  him, 
tight,  and  kissed  his  mouth.  He  gathered  her  up  in  his 
arms,  and  tears,  utterly  unwonted  and  amazing,  filled  his 
eyes. 

"It  was  your  beard  I  was  afraid  of,"  she  murmured. 
"But  I  guess  I  like  it." 

He  let  her  go,  abruptly,  for  there  was  another  damned 
echo  in  that.  It  was  a  thing  that  had  been  said  to  him 
before. 

Then  he  dashed  the  unwelcome  memory  out  of  his  mind. 
"Look  here!"  he  cried.  "How  long  will  it  take  you  to 
dress?  If  you'll  be  quick,  I'll  wait.  Take  you  down 
town  with  me  to  the  office.  I  want  'em  to  see  you.  Be 
sides,  it's  the  place  you'll  have  to  come  when  you  want 
money. ' ' 

"I'll  fly,"  she  said. 

3 

"I'd  never  have  left  a  son  of  mine,"  Joe  had  profanely 
assured  Jennie  Mac  Arthur,  "to  be  brought  up  by  Fan- 
nings."  His  perfectly  illogical  assumption  had  been,  all 
along,  that  a  son  would  have  been  like  him;  a  daughter 
must  be  like  Annabel. 

But  when  they  had  held  up  the  new-born  child  for  her 
to  see,  Annabel  had  cried  out,  weakly,  and  covered  her  face 


140         JOSEPH  GEEER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

with  her  hands;  for  the  baby  was,  literally,  just  a  little 
red  image  of  her  husband.  The  terrifying  resemblance 
faded,  as  such  resemblances  are  likely  to  do,  within  the 
first  few  hours,  but  not  until  it  had  been  significantly  re 
marked  and  commented  upon  by  the  grandparents.  t  They 
sometimes  spoke,  piously,  of  the  child,  as  a  "judgment." 
Indeed,  Beatrice  could  remember  having  heard  them  speak 
of  her  like  that,  though  without  knowing  exactly  what  they 
meant. 

It  is  a  paradox,  of  course — but  not  inadmissibly  far 
fetched,  perhaps, — to  say  that  Beatrice,  for  all  the  smug 
suburban  atmosphere  which  was  all  she'd  ever  had  to 
breathe  and  her  strictly  pietistic  upbringing,  was  much 
more  a  creature  of  the  jungle  than  Joe  himself.  The 
cardinal  fact  in  her  life  was  fear,  cutting  two  ways  as  it 
does  with  all  carnivorous  wild  things :  fear  of  others,  and 
the  fear  she  was  able  to  inspire  in  others;  though  it  wasn't 
always  the  stronger  she  was  afraid  of,  nor  the  weaker  who 
were  afraid  of  her.  She  couldn't  remember  making  the 
discovery  that  her  mother  was  sometimes  afraid  of  her.  It 
was  a  fact  she'd  always  known  and,  more  or  less,  played 
upon. 

She'd  early  learned  a  wild  animal's  slyness.  She 
stalked  the  things  she  wanted,  furtively,  like  a  little  half- 
tamed  cat;  everything,  from  cookies  in  the  pantry,  up. 
And  when  caught,  in  flagrant  possession  of  her  spoils, 
she  fought  for  them,  furiously,  winning  as  a  rule  a  grudg 
ing  but  sometimes  illusory  concession. 

None  of  the  Fannings,  of  course, — this  including  Anna 
bel — could  have  entertained  so  impious  a  thought  as  a 
doubt  of  their  whole-hearted  love  for  the  child,  and  that 
they  did  so  love  her — an  assertion  continually  reiterated, 
usually  in  connection  with  disciplinary  measures  of  some 
sort, — by  the  force  of  their  own  good  faith,  they  made  the 
girl  believe.  It  gave  her  a  rather  lurid  idea,  though,  of 
what  love  was.  It  was  something  that  justified  you  in 
doing  the  meanest  and  most  tyrannous  things  you  could 
think  of,  to  anybody  who  was  the  object  of  it.  That  was, 


THE  CUB  141 

apparently,  the  way  God  loved  you,  too.  He  was  always 
listening  to  things  you  said,  spying  on  things  you  did, 
putting  black  marks  against  you.  When  He  'd  accumulated 
enough  black  marks  against  you,  He  sent  you  to  hell.  She 
worried  about  hell  occasionally,  but,  in  the  main,  she  had 
more  immediate  matters  to  occupy  her  mind. 

Left  to  herself,  Annabel  wasn't  capable  of  exercising  a 
very  formidable,  or  even  resolute,  discipline,  and  there 
were  periods  when,  for  one  reason  or  another,  she  was  so 
left  to  herself.  But  under  the  incitement  of  the  idea, 
harped  upon  by  her  own  parents,  that  the  child 's  escapades 
— truancies  from  school,  mostly, — her  wilfulness,  her 
flashes  of  clear  defiance,  were  "her  father  coming  out  in 
her, ' '  and  that  it  was  a  matter  of  salvation — no  less — that 
these  manifestations  be  crushed,  the  mother  could  nerve 
herself  to  acts  of  a  frantic  sort  of  severity.  There  wasn't 
any  rule  or  formula  by  which  you  could  tell  whether  the 
lightning  was  going  to  strike. 

Beatrice  had  never  been  able  to  explain  why  she  so 
persistently  played  truant  from  school.  She  more  or  less 
adopted,  for  lack  of  a  better,  her  grandfather's  explana 
tion  that  it  was  at  the  promptings  of  the  devil.  The 
simple  fact  was  that  she  had  inherited  her  father 's  avidity 
of  mind  and  his  capacity  for  concentration.  When  she 
was  sent  to  the  first  grade  of  the  public  school,  at  the 
orthodox  age  of  six,  she  was,  by  a  year  or  two,  precocious. 
She  devoured  a  week's  pabulum  in  a  day.  It  was  an  old- 
fashioned  grade  school  where  they  took  no  cognizance  of  a 
mind  like  that,  and  they  drove  her  frantic  by  telling  her 
patiently,  over  and  over  again,  things  she  already  knew; 
remonstrating  with  her  when  she  was  inattentive.  So, 
making  use  of  her  feral  technique  for  evading  the  eye  of 
authority,  she  disappeared  in  search  of  more  profitable  em 
ployment.  She  burked  messages  they  gave  her  to  carry 
home,  and  by  ten,  she  was  a  successful  forger  of  her 
mother's  rather  formless  handwriting. 

When  she  was  around  twelve  years  olcL,  she  die1  find  •* 
teacher  who  understood  what  was  the  matter  with  her.  -2*. 


142         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

vivid,  wonderful,  almost  unbelievable  person  she  seemed 
to  Beatrice,  who  held  her  attention  instead  of  scolding 
her  for  not  giving  it;  who  challenged  her  with  hard  tasks 
and  shared  her  triumph  over  their  accomplishment.  They 
took  walks  together;  they  talked^  about  things  that  weren't 
lessons;  they  shared,  or  so  it  seemed  to  Beatrice,  con 
fidences.  There  was  the  space  of  a  few  months  when  the 
Fannings  doubtfully  began  to  believe  that  the  change  of 
heart,  the  saving  descent  of  grace  which  they  'd  prayed  for 
so  long,  had  come.  But,  abruptly,  just  before  the  end  of 
that  school  year,  this  teacher  was  dismissed.  Beatrice 
couldn't  learn  precisely  why,  though  it  was  something  that 
had  to  do  with  a  man.  She  was  engaged  to  a  man  who  was 
married,  or  something  like  that.  At  home,  her  name 
couldn't  be  mentioned.  Miss  Morgan  wrote  her  a  note 
which  Grandma  Fanning  got  hold  of,  exhibited  to  her 
and  burned  in  her  presence  without  permitting  her  to 
read. 

Beatrice  made  active  war  on  her  family  for  a  while 
after  that  and  she  went  no  more  to  school  that  year;  but 
against  people  you  had  to  see  every  day  and  live  with  and 
were  dependent  on,  a  feud  couldn't  be  kept  up  indefinitely. 
It  subsided  into  'what  the  family  called  sulks  and  were 
content,  in  the  main,  to  ignore. 

Behind  the  blank  wall  of  sullen  acquiescence,  which  she 
persistently  turned  toward  them,  an  epoch-making  event 
took  place  in  the  girl's  life.  Rummaging,  one  afternoon 
during  her  mother's  absence,  through  a  box  in  the  store 
room,  she  came  upon  a  packet  of  old  letters  which  Joe  had 
written,  at  one  time  and  another,  to  Annabel.  (It  is  a 
perfect  key  to  Annabel's  character  that  she  had  never  de 
stroyed  these  letters; — had  kept  them  all,  in  chronological 
order,  hidden  under  a  heap  of  discarded  clothes  in  an 
old  box.)  The  girl  read  through  half  the  letters,  per 
haps,  carried  on  by  nothing  deeper  than  mischief, — a  sense 
of  scoring  off  her  mother.  Then,  with  the  dazzling  sud 
denness  of  revelation,  it  broke  over  her  that  the  writer  of 
the  letters  was  her  own  father.  Her  first  act  was  to  ab- 


TIIE  CUB  143 

stract  the  whole  bundle  from  her  mother's  hiding-place 
and  transfer  it  to  one  of  her  own  (she  had  plenty  of  them 
and  she  chose  the  safest).  She  took  the  most  elaborate  pre 
cautions  against  the  mischance  of  getting  caught  reading 
them,  but  during  hours  of  real  security  she  pored  over 
them  like  a  scholar  over  a  precious  newly-discovered  text. 
She  brought  to  them  all  the  powers  of  logical  deduction 
and  all  the  capacity  for  imaginative  surmise  which  she 
possessed.  They  became,  for  a  period  of  months,  the  cen 
tral  fact  in  her  life. 

Any  one  of  the  Fannings  would  have  said  confidently 
that  Joe  had  never  been  mentioned  in  his  daughter's  pres 
ence  except,  in  reply  to  an  occasional  direct  question  about 
him,  to  the  effect  that  she  mustn't  ask.  It  was  wicked 
to  lie,  so  of  course,  they'd  never  told  her  her  father  was 
dead.  There  had  been,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  a  good  many 
references  to  him,  either  in  language  they  thought  she 
wouldn't  understand  or  at  times  when  they  hadn't  sup 
posed  she  was  listening, — and  her  inbred  slyness  had  in 
duced  them  to  go  on  thinking  so.  But  it  wasn't  till  now 
that  she'd  ever  taken  the  enigma  of  him  seriously,  or  set 
about  solving  it.  Under  the  powerful  stimulus  of  the  let 
ters,  the  dragnet  of  her  memory  brought  up  a  number  of 
facts  which  she  pieced  in  with  those  the  letters  contained. 

Her  father  had  been,  according  to  Fanning  standards,  a 
wicked  man.  But  then,  weren't  most  of  the  nice  people 
in  the  world  wicked?  She'd  been  led  to  think  so.  He'd 
done  something,  she  supposed,  just  as  Miss  Morgan  had, 
that  had  condemned  him  to  be  sent  away  and  consigned  to' 
oblivion.  He  must  have  gone  very  soon  after  she  was 
born;  for  she  couldn't  remember  him  at  all.  Perhaps 
making  her  mother  have  a  baby  had  been  his  crime. 
Maybe  she,  Beatrice,  was  a  child  of  sin.  It  was  a  phrase 
she'd  heard,  occasionally,  but  had  never  been  able  to  get 
interpreted.  But  why  hadn't  he  taken  her  with  him  when 
he  went  away?  She  thought  one  who  was  wicked,  one's 
self,  might  have  treated  her  own  derelictions  more  toler 
antly. 


144         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

She  built  him  up  into  an  imaginary  ally;  a  romantic 
stranger,  disguised,  sometimes,  in  rags,  sometimes  in  over 
whelming  panoply,  coming  dramatically  to  her  rescue  in 
hours  of  need. 

Romance,  indeed,  "was  in  the  very  fabric  of  the  letters 
from  South  America,  in  the  foreign  feel  of  the  paper  and 
the  queer  look  of  the  stamps  and  post-marks,  in  his  bold 
black  handwriting.  Of  explicit  facts  about  the  life  he 
led,  there  were  not  many;  occasional  nuggets,  merely,  but 
these  had  the  malleability  of  fine  gold,  and  hammered  out 
thin  by  much  thinking,  they  gilded  vast  areas ;  construction 
camps,  Indians,  hours  in  the  saddle,  mountain  and  desert, 
revolutionary  armies,  vast  waterfalls  and  canyons,  muti 
nies  and  feuds.  There  were  darker  references,  too,  to  ear 
lier  experiences,  which,  it  appeared,  her  mother  had  already 
known  something  about,  to  jungles  and  cannibals  and 
poisoned  darts. 

There  was  a  quiescent  period  of  months — a  breathing 
spell  for  the  Fannings — when  she  was  content  to  day 
dream  about  him.  Then  an  access  of  energy  took  her  and 
she  bought  a  pony. 

The  next  thing  to  godliness,  in  Grandpa  Fanning 's 
mind,  was  thrift,  and  in  this,  back  in  the  era  of  Miss 
Morgan's  influence,  she  had  taken  a  sudden  interest.  She 
had  consented  to  the  impounding  of  the  major  part  of 
her  small  allowance  in  a  savings-account.  She  had  under 
taken — and  more  or  less  fulfilled — sundry  tasks  at  a  wage 
agreed  upon.  Grandpa,  now  and  then  when  her  zeal 
showed  signs  of  flagging,  had  fortified  it  by  a  donation, 
once — in  a  soft  moment — to  the  princely  tune  of  twenty- 
five  dollars.  The  sheer  enormity  of  the  crime  of  em 
bezzling  this  fund,  by  the  simple  process  of  drawing  it 
out  of  the  bank,  had  prevented  any  of  them — even,  for  a 
good  while,  Beatrice  herself — from  thinking  of  it. 

But  a  neighbor  boy  she  knew — he  was  in  her  class  in 
high  school — discovered  a  passionate  need,  irately  denied 
by  his  father,  for  a  wireless  outfit.  His  one  possession, 
doubtfully  negotiable,  was  a  Welsh  pony.  At  random,  one 


THE  CUB  145 

day,  on  the  back  seat  in  French  class,  he  spoke  to  Beatrice 
about  it.  She  scribbled  in  her  exercise  book,  "I'll  pay 
you  fifty  dollars  for  him,"  and,  within  a  day,  the  trans 
action  was  completed.  There  was  need  on  both  sides  that 
it  remain  confidential.  The  pony  continued  to  be  housed 
and  fed  at  the  expense  of  the  boy's  unsuspecting  father, 
but  he  belonged,  forelock  to  shoes,  saddle,  bridle  and 
quirt,  to  Beatrice.  She  had  no  clothes  she  could  ride  in, 
so  the  boy  threw  in  a  flannel  shirt  and  a  pair  of  knicker 
bockers,  discarded  since  he  had  gone  into  trousers. 

She  played  truant  now  not  merely  to  escape  the  boredom 
of  school  but  to  carry  out  delightful  and  moderately  ad 
venturous  projects.  They  lived  in  the  outskirts  of  town 
whence  it  was  easy  for  the  girl  to  ride  into  the  open 
country,  and  it  was  months  before  her  new  activities  were 
found  out  at  home.  She  was  caught  at  a  time  when, 
lucidly,  her  grandparents  were  away  on  a  trip  to  Seattle, 
and  Beatrice  had  only  her  mother  to  reckon  with.  Fight 
ing  furiously  to  keep  her  loved  possession,  she  found  she 
had  a  weapon,  a  threat  which  turned  her  mother  white. 

"If  you  take  my  pony  away  from  me,"  she  said,  "I'll 
run  away.  I'll  go  to  my  father." 

She  was  clever  enough  not  to  elaborate  the  threat,  aware 
that  an  attempt  to  do  so  might  betray  her  inability  to 
carry  it  out.  She  answered  none  of  the  frantic  questions 
that  were  flung  at  her;  entrenched  herself  in  silence  and 
waited.  And  she  won  a  victory.  Her  mother  conceded 
the  pony,  exacting  certain  lightly  given  promises  in  re 
turn  :  that  Beatrice  would  be  a  good  obedient  girl  and  go 
regularly  to  school.  The  threat  wasn  't  again  referred  to ; 
Beatrice  guessed  it  never  was  mentioned  to  her  grand 
parents.  When  they  returned,  the  pony  was  an  openly 
vested  possession  with  which  they  did  not  attempt  to  in 
terfere. 

This  victory  had  one  important  result.  It  brought 
about  her  acquaintance  with  Carmichael  Blair.  She  came 
upon  him  one  morning, — this  was  in  June,  1915,  just  at 
the  beginning  of  her  school  vacation, — out  beyond  the  San 


146         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Gabriel  Mission,  painting  swiftly  upon  a  number-forty 
canvas,  a  picture  that  was  nearly  all  sky.  He  said  hello 
to  her  in  an  amiably  absent-minded  way  as  she  rode  up 
and,  without  interruption,  sped  on  with  his  work.  She 
looked  on  from  the  saddle  for  a  moment  or  two;  then,  as 
his  preoccupation  seemed  to  make  her  welcome  rather 
than  otherwise,  dismounted,  threw  her  reins  over  the 
pony's  head,  and  came  up  behind  his  shoulder  where  she 
could  follow  the  brush  from  palette  to  canvas. 

She'd  never  thought  of  the  sky  as  anything  but  solid 
blue,  or  the  process  of  painting  one  as  anything  be 
yond  getting  the  right  tint  of  blue  paint  spread  smoothly 
over  the  canvas.  This  surprising  person  was  putting  the 
most  incredible  colors  into  it. 

' '  You  're  too  close  to  it, ' '  he  said,  interpreting  a  protest 
ing  gasp  she  gave.  "Come  back  here." 

She  followed  him  back  four  or  five  paces  for  a  look,  but 
even  from  this  distance  it  wasn't  entirely  convincing. 

"It's  sort  of  exciting,  though,"  she  conceded. 

But  the  really  exciting  thing  was  watching  him  do  it. 
She  stayed  for  two  or  three  hours,  absorbed,  most  of  the 
time,  just  in  the  brush  strokes,  though  her  attention 
strayed  now  and  then  to  make  notes  upon  his  person  and 
his  equipment.  He  was  rather  nice-looking,  she  decided, 
in  an  unromantic,  matter-of-fact  sort  of  way.  He  looked 
fairly  old,  but  the  easy-going  bruskness  of  his  manner  made 
him  seem  younger  than  any  other  adult  person  she  knew. 
He  spoke  to  her  but  seldom,  and  then  in  mere  snatches, 
occasionally  to  ask  her  for  something  which  she  was  di 
rected  to  find  in  his  car.  She  rather  liked  taking  these 
orders,  since  they  carried  an  implicit  permission  to  stay 
on  watching  him  work. 

The  car  was  amusing.  It  would  have  absorbed  her  but 
for  her  livelier  interest  in  something  else.  It  was  a  small 
touring  car,  or  had  been  once,  but  it  had  been  ingeniously 
adapted  to  serve  his  special  needs.  The  back  seat  had 
been  taken  out,  and  the  whole  tonneau  was  filled  with  what 
looked  like  a  wild  miscellany  of  incongruous  objects: 


THE  CUB  147 

jugs,  boxes,  hampers,  a  blanket  roll,  a  rack  for  canvasses. 
Both  doors  on  one  side  were  blocked  off  by  a  thing  which 
she  finally  decided  was  a  sort  of  folding-bed  that  hinged 
down  and  opened  out. 

' '  I  can  stay  out  for  days  with  that, ' '  he  told  her.  ' '  Eat, 
drink,  sleep  and  paint.  My  wife  says  it  looks  like  the  last 
stages  of  Noah's  Ark.  She  doesn't  mind,  though." 

The"  knowledge  that  he  was  married  did  not  impress 
Beatrice  much.  Her  interest  in  him  wasn't  romantic; 
hardly  personal. 

He  remarked,  after  a  while,  that  he  guessed  it  must  be 
lunch  time,  and  directed  her  to  the  hamper  where  food  was 
to  be  found.  But  when  she'd  opened  it,  he  showed  no 
intention  to  stop  painting.  "Pitch  in,"  he  commanded. 
"This  light's  changing  so  darn  fast  I  don't  dare  quit." 
So  she  ate,  with  unwonted  diffidence,  a  sandwich  or  two 
and  an  orange. 

At  last,  his  furious  pace  slackened.  He  paid  no  more 
attention  to  the  altered  sky;  turned  the  canvas  round  so 
that  the  light  fell  upon  it  differently.  He  went  on  gazing 
at  it  abstractedly  for  a  good  many  minutes,  sometimes 
making  imperceptible  changes  upon  it  with  brush  or 
fingers,  and  in  the  same  preoccupied  way  he  reached  into 
the  hamper  and  ate  a  sandwich,  consuming,  indifferently, 
along  with  it,  an  amount  of  paint  which  she  hoped  wouldn  't 
prove  fatal. 

Suddenly  he  looked  at  her.  "Well,"  he  said  simply, 
"I  think  that's  a  peach,  myself.  How  do  you  like  it!" 

She  went  around  beside  him  where  she  could  see  it,  too ; 
and  now  it  broke  over  her  that  the  thing  was  wonderful. 
It  made  her  feel  a  little  like  crying.  Even  though,  she 
persisted,  it  didn't  look  exactly  like  the  thing  he'd  been 
painting.  It  had  never  occurred  to  her,  before,  that  a 
picture  could  be  meant  for  anything  except  to  be  like 
something  else.  He  seemed  amused,  and  pleased,  too, 
when  she  said  something  of  the  sort. 

He  fitted  the  picture  into  the  place  in  the  rack  from 
which,  a  blank  canvas,  it  had  been  taken  out  a  little  ear- 


148         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Her;  put  the  rest  of  his  traps  into  the  tonneau;  sat  down 
at  the  steering-wheel,  and  pressed  the  starter,  evidently 
bent,  now  his  business  was  finished,  on  going  somewhere 
else, — home,  most  likely,  wherever  that  was, — without  loss 
of  time.  She  felt  pretty  blank  at  this,  and  he  must  have 
seen  it  in  her  face,  for  he  got  down  from  the  car  again 
and  came  to  her,  holding  out  a  hand. 

' '  It  has  been  a  nice  day,  hasn  't  it  ? ' '  he  said. ' '  I  've  en 
joyed  it  a  lot." 

She  stammered  that  she  hoped  she  could  watch  him  paint 
again  some  time,  and  his  response  to  this  was  cordiality  it 
self  though  completely  vague. 

"I  hope  so,  too,"  he  told  her.  "That'll  be  fine!" 
With  no  more  words  than  that,  he  got  back  into  his  car 
and  drove  away,  in  a  cloud  of  dust. 

Beatrice  getting  home  that  night,  late  and  ravenous  for 
supper,  told  her  mother  at  the  end  of  the  meal  that  she 
knew  what  she  wanted  to  do.  She  wanted  to  be  a  painter. 

She  was  startled  by  her  mother's  reception  of  the  idea, 
for  she.'d  been  braced  for  the  usual  scandalized  refusal. 
Her  mother  was  suspicious  of  course;  wanted  to  know 
whatever  put  that  idea  into  the  girl's  head.  And  equally 
of  course,  Beatrice  lied  about  the  reason;  suppressed  the 
painter  completely. 

But  her  mother's  incredulity  seemed  to  spring  from 
hope  rather  than  dismay,  and  she  began  planning  prac 
tical  details  at  once.  There  was  a  woman  who  lived  in  a 
little  bungalow  the  other  side  of  town,  who  gave  drawing 
lessons.  "When  Beatrice  protested  that  she  wanted  to 
paint,  not  draw,  her  mother  laughed  at  her  with  good- 
humored  indulgence.  "You  have  to  learn  to  draw  first, 
Bee,"  she  said.  "Besides,  Miss  Jackson  paints,  too,  when 
you  get  that  far.  "Water  colors;  very  pretty.  I  saw 
some  of  them  the  other  day  at  "Watson 's  store.  Miniatures, 
too,  I  think.  On  ivory.  If  you  really  want  to  learn,  the 
sooner  you  begin,  the  better." 

The  misgiving  that  she  didn't  want  to  learn  anything 
that  the  casual  Miss  Jackson  could  teach  her  was  stifled  for 


THE  CUB  149 

the  time  in  astonishment  over  her  mother's  attitude.  She 
acted  queerly  stirred  about  it,  strangely  affectionate,  flut 
tered;  she  even  cried  a  little.  And  at  last,  she  gave  the 
girl  an  explanation. 

"It  seems  so  queer,"  she  said,  "after  all  these  years,  to 
find  something  in  you  that  you  take  after  me. ' '  She  added, 
a  little  sheepishly,  to  the  girl's  echoed,  "After  youf* 
"I  wanted  to  be  an  artist  once.  I  might  have  been  one 
now,  just  as  good  as  Miss  Jackson,  if  papa  hadn't  stopped 
me." 

Beatrice's  misgiving,  that  drawing  lessons  with  Miss 
Jackson  weren't  what  she  wanted  at  all,  was  confirmed  up 
to  the  hilt  during  the  first  week.  The  lady  was  tall,  thin 
and  aggressively  optimistic.  She  always  prefaced  criti 
cism,  even  the  most  destructive,  with  little  exclamations  of 
encouragement.  "Well,  well,  we're  getting  on  fine!"  she 
would  say.  "But  don't  you  see,  dear,  .  .  ."  Her  fun 
damental  axiom  was  that  you  had  to  lay  the  foundation, 
down  underneath  the  ground,  before  you  could  go  on  to 
the  more  ornamental  and  agreeable  parts  of  the  building. 
And,  if  the  foundation  wasn't  right,  everything  after 
ward  would  be  wrong.  Laying  the  foundation  consisted, 
it  seemed,  in  having  your  pencil  sharpened  just  so,  and 
holding  it  just  so,  when  you  were  learning  to  make  certain 
kinds  of  lines, — straight  lines  and  curved  lines.  You  draw 
a  great  many  pictures  of  a  cube  in  various  positions,  get 
ting  the  angles  square  and  the  sides  alike,  except  where 
there  entered  a  mysterious  thing  which  Miss  Jackson  called 
"  purrspective "  and  talked  about  with  an  assurance 
which  struck  the  girl  as  perhaps  a  little  unreal.  From 
this,  you  were  promoted  to  a  flower  pot,  below  the  level 
of  the  eye  so  that  its  top  was  seen  as  an  ellipse. 

"There's  a  way  of  drawing  that  right,"  Beatrice  said, 
after  struggling  with  it  for  a  while.  "You  do  it  with  a 
loose  string  fastened  between  two  pins.  I  learned  that  in 
geometry. ' ' 

The  idea  horrified  Miss  Jackson.  This  was  free-hand 
drawing  we  were  doing.  The  use  of  mechanical  aids,  such 


150         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  IHS  DAUGHTER 

as  rulers,  compasses  and  so  forth,  was  immoral, — like 
cheating.  She  told  Beatrice  about  Andrea  del  Sarto.  He 
was  a  painter  so  great  that  he  could  draw,  free-hand,  a 
circle  so  perfect  that  it  couldn't  be  distinguished,  even  by 
experts,  from  one  produced  by  means  of  instruments. 

By  way  of  enlivening  her  pupil's  labors,  she  talked  en 
thusiastically  of  the  successive  steps :  after  the  flower  pot, 
a  teacup  and  saucer,  with  a  lump  of  sugar  beside  it ;  and, 
after  this,  shapes  still  more  difficult.  When  you'd  become 
proficient  with  lead  pencil,  you  were  promoted  to  char 
coal,  and  the  mysteries  of  shading,  with  a  stump.  The 
day  would  come  wheli  that  plaster  Demosthenes  in  the  cor 
ner  would  be  set  before  you,  at  a  suitable  angle,  to  draw. 
And  beyond  that, — well,  there  was  no  reason  why  we 
shouldn't  some  day  begin  to  sketch  in  water  color. 

"But  how  about  regular  painting?"  Beatrice  asked. 
"That's  what  I  want  to  do." 

"Oils?  Oh,  that's  the  last  thing.  That's  very  serious, 
indeed." 

Beatrice  stuck  for  a  week,  and  it  wouldn't  have  lasted 
as  long  as  that  had  not  her  scouting  trips,  in  search  of  the 
man  who  painted  the  sky,  proved  unsuccessful.  She 
jogged  about,  pony-back,  every  afternoon,  in  the  vicinity  of 
San  Gabriel,  without  finding  a  trace  of  him. 

Finally,  rather  late  one  afternoon,  as  she  was  returning 
from  another  unsuccessful  cast — this  time  along  the  rim  of 
the  Arroyo, — just  on  the  edge  of  town,  she  saw,  through  a 
gateway  in  a  wall,  his  car  and  without  hesitation  she  rode 
in.  The  enclosure  was  a  little  yard  or  compound  between 
a  bungalow  and  a  low  stone  building  which  she  'd  have  as 
sumed  to  be  a  garage  except  that  it  didn  't  look  like  one.  It 
had  an  arched  doorway  filled  by  an  ancient  oak  door  with 
great  hinges  and  bolts  in  it  like  one  of  the  missions,  and 
this  resemblance  was  heightened  by  what  looked  like  a 
shrine, — a  niche  with  a  little  painted  statue  of  a  saint  or 
something  in  it. 

An  old  woman  now  stuck  her  head  out  of  the  kitchen 
door  of  the  bungalow ;  an  old  wrinkled  leather-faced  woman 


THE  CUB  151 

•who  looked  at  her  earnestly  a  moment  and  then  called 
back  shrilly  into  the  house  in  French,  Beatrice  thought. 
After  an  uneasy  minute,  for  the  foreign  language  made  the 
girl  wonder  a  little  what  she'd  got  into,  the  other  bunga 
low  door  opened  and  another  woman  appeared,  very  jolly- 
looking  somehow,  with  a  fresh  clean  brightness  about  her. 
She  paused  an  instant  in  the  doorway;  then,  seeing  her 
visitor  was  mounted,  she  came  out  toward  the  girl. 

"Have  you  come  to  see  me?"  she  asked. 

"Why,  I  came,"  Beatrice  said,  "to  see  the  man  that 
paints.  I've  been  looking  everywhere  for  him  for  about 
a  week,  and  I  saw  his  car  in  here  .  .- . " 

"He'll  be  out  in  a  minute,"  the  woman  said.  "He's 
over  there,"  she  nodded  toward  the  convent-garage,  "in 
the  studio.  But  I'm  afraid  he  can't  stop  to  see  you  now; 
he's  just  flying  off  in  an  awful  rush  in  order  not  to  miss 
a  light  he  wants." 

"It's  all  right,"  Beatrice  said,  "if  he  lives  here.  I  can 
come  again,  any  time." 

"Wait  a  minute!"  the  woman  said.  She  was  standing 
now  at  the  girl's  stirrup,  and  without  warning  she  called 
suddenly,  "Mike!" 

The  pony  took  it  into  its  head  to  resent  this  and  shied 
violently.  The  convent  door  burst  open  with  a  creak, 
and  the  painter  came  out  carrying  a  big  half-painted 
canvas.  The  pony,  further  affronted,  reared.  The 
woman  cried  out.  The  man  whipped  his  canvas  back  into 
the  shelter  of  the  doorway.  Beatrice  gave  the  pony  the 
quirt  and  kicked  him  in  the  ribs  as  hard  as  she  could,  at 
the  same  time.  He  subsided  at  once,  and  she  swung  him 
around,  for  safe-keeping,  into  the  angle  of  the  wall.  The 
painter,  now  his  canvas  was  out  of  the  way,  was  coming 
to  her  assistance. 

"He's  all  right,"  she  assured  him. 

"Why,  it's  you!"  he  cried,  in  a  tone  of  pleased  recog 
nition,  and  was  apparently  coming  over  to  shake  hands 
with  her,  when  he  stopped  short  and  backed  away  again, 
narrowed  his  eyes  and  stared.  "By  golly!"  he  cried. 


152         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"I've  always  known  I  wanted  to  do  something  with  that 
corner.  Do  you  mind  staying  there  a  minute — ten  min 
utes — until  I  can  get  it  down?"  He  didn't  wait  for  her 
answer,  but  bolted  back  into  the  studio. 

His  wife  laughed.  "You're  the  limit,  Mike,"  she  called 
after  him.  Then  she  turned  to  the  girl.  "You  don't 
mind,  do  you?  You  are  perfectly  lovely  like  that,  with 
that  light  on  you." 

Beatrice  replied,  a  little  dazed,  that  she  didn't.  No 
one  had  ever  told  her  that  she  looked  lovely,  even  when 
she  was  dressed  up,  and  in  these  awful  old  riding  things 
it  seemed  incredible. 

The  painter  came  out  again  in  a  minute  or  two  carrying 
a  big  flat  wooden  box;  sat  down  on  a  bench  against  the 
wall  of  the  bungalow,  opened  the  box  on  his  knees  and 
began  drawing,  apparently  on  the  inside  of  the  lid. 

His  wife  nodded  to  the  girl,  said,  "There'll  be  tea  pretty 
soon,"  and  disappeared  into  the  house. 

As  for  the  man,  he  didn't  speak  a  word,  and,  though  he 
kept  looking  up  at  her  every  minute,  it  was,  somehow,  as 
if  he  didn't  see  her  at  all.  The  glare  of  the  low-hanging 
sun,  reflected  from  the  pink  wall  and  the  hard-packed 
red  earth,  was  hot  in  her  face.  The  pony  fidgeted,  and 
she  had  hard  work  keeping  him  still.  The  ten  minutes 
the  painter  had  asked  for  must  have  been  long  exceeded. 
How  long,  she  couldn't  guess.  But  the  man  painted  on, 
oblivious. 

His  wife  came  out,  at  last ;  said  to  her  with  a  commiser 
ating  smile,  "I  hope  you're  not  too  awfully  tired,"  and 
then,  looking  over  her  husband 's  shoulder,  forgot  all  about 
her.  "That's  gorgeous,  Mike!"  she  said. 

"Isn't  it  great,"  he  asked,  "the  way  that  scarf  reflects 
on  the  under  side  of  her  face?"  For  another  short  eter 
nity,  he  worked  on.  At  last,  he  laid  palette  and  brushes 
on  the  bench  beside  him,  held  the  color  box  out  at  arm's 
length  in  both  hands,  stared  at  it  intently  a  while,  and 
rose.  ' '  That  '11  do, ' '.  he  said.  "  I  '11  paint  it  up  some  day. ' ' 
Then,  somehow,  the  look  that  he  turned  upon  the  girl 


THE  CUB  153 

lighted  into  a  smile  which  swept  away  her  pent-up  re 
sentment.  "I'm  just  awfully  obliged  to  you,"  he  said. 

On  the  way  into  the  house  for  tea — after  they  had  tied 
up  the  pony  in  the  shade — he  let  her  stop  to  look  at  what 
he  had  been  painting, — a  terribly  embarrassing  moment 
since  she  couldn't  find  a  word  to  say.  The  thing  looked, 
simply,  like  an  unbelievable  daub,  as  if  it  had  been  paint 
ed  by  a  child.  Things  like  her  hands  and  the  pony's  feet 
weren't  painted  at  all.  Her  face  hadn't  any  features, 
was  just  a  mess  of  red  and  ugly  ochre  paint.  But  neither 
the  man  nor  his  wife  seemed  affronted  by  her  silence. 

And  in  their  living-room — a  funny,  big,  half-empty 
place,  she  forgot  the  picture,  for  a  while,  altogether. 

She'd  never  met  people  like  these.  They  were  unmis 
takably  grown-up  but  they  didn't  act  nor  talk  that  way. 
They  just  acted — natural;  did  and  said,  it  seemed,  what 
ever  they  liked.  They  called  each  other  Mike  and  Wanda, 
and,  when  they  learned  her  name,  they  called  her  Beatrice. 
The  leather-faced  old  French  woman,  who  was  in  and 
out  of  the  room  as  she  chose,  bringing  edibles  as  it  occurred 
to  her  to  do  so  and  taking  them  away  when  she  thought 
they'd  had  enough,  didn't  act  like  a  servant,  though 
plainly  enough  she  was.  She  talked  with  them,  in  her 
own  language,  volubly ;  sometimes  it  sounded  as  if  she  was 
scolding  them,  but  they  didn't  seem  to  care, — answering, 
now  meekly,  now  jocularly,  in  French  that  seemed  to  cut 
the  corners  just  as  hers  did.  She  tried  to  imagine  her 
mother  talking  to  a  servant  like  that. 

Mike  arose,  indolently,  after  a  while,  and,  without  ex 
cuse  or  explanation,  wandered  out  into  the  yard  (they  both 
managed,  she  observed,  to  seem  perfectly  nice  and  amiable 
without  any  of  the  flourishes  which  she'd  been  taught 
were  manners),  and,  pretty  soon,  she  heard  him  come  in 
again.  She  didn't  turn  to  see  what  he  was  doing,  down 
there  at  the  other  end  of  the  room  behind  her,  because 
Wanda  went  straight  on  talking.  But  presently  the 
woman  said,  "Now,  look  round,  and  see  what  you  think  of 
yourself." 


154         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Mike  had  just  hung  a  picture  on  the  wall,  and  it  was — 
it  must  be — the  very  picture  he'd  just  painted  of  her.  It 
was  in  a  frame.  She  didn't  see  how  a  picture  could  be 
framed  as  quickly  as  that.  Besides,  it  didn't  seem  cred 
ible  that  it  could  be  the  same.  From  away  off  here  at  the 
other  end  of  the  room,  it  looked — finished;  beautiful! 
The  pony  was  all  there ;  she  was  all  there  herself,  even  her 
face,  and  she  knew  he  hadn't  painted  a  face  at  all.  And 
the  blaze  of  sunlight  glorified  it. 

"It  sings,  doesn't  it?"  "Wanda  remarked.  And  this 
seemed  to  be  literally  true.  It  appeared  that  both  of  them 
enjoyed  her  frank  astonishment  over  it. 

"You  know,"  she  mustered  courage  to  say  to  Mike,  as 
he  wandered  over  and  stood  beside  her,  "why  I  wanted 
to  find  you,  was  to  ask  you  if  you'd  teach  me  to  paint,  too. 
I  don't  suppose  I  ever  could." 

"Well,  you  never  can  tell  till  you  try,"  he  answered, 
off  the  top  of  his  mind.  Then,  coming  into  a  little  sharper 
focus,  "Ever  studied  at  all?"  he  asked. 

She  decided  to  annihilate  Miss  Jackson.  "Never,"  she 
said. 

"That's  fine!"  he  exclaimed.  "I'm  going  up  the  Ar 
royo  to-morrow  morning — pretty  early,  though.  You  can 
come  along,  if  you  like.  Wear  some  old  clothes.  You're 
likely  to  get  as  much  paint  on  yourself  as  you  do  on  the 
picture." 

"Paint?"  she  asked.  "You  mean  oil  paint?  You'd 
let  me  begin  that  way?" 

"It's  the  only  way  to  teach  anybody  to  let  outlines 
alone,"  he  said  indifferently. 

"You  don't  care  when  you  get  home,  do  you?"  Wanda 
warned  her.  "If  he  gets  going,  he  usually  makes  a  day 
of  it.  I'll  put  you  up  some  grub." 

It  occurred  to  Beatrice,  as  she  rode  home  through  the 
thick  twilight,  that  they  hadn  't  asked  her  a  question :  who 
she  was,  where  she  lived,  anything.  Nor  had  they  volun 
teered  any  more  facts  than  they'd  asked.  Beyond  Mike 
and  Wanda,  she  didn't  even  know  their  names.  And  he 


THE  CUB  155 

hadn't  said  a  word  about  how  many  lessons  she'd  need, 
nor  breathed  a  hint  about  pay. 

She  told  her  mother,  accounting  for  the  fact  that  she 
was  late  for  supper,  that  she'd  got  lost,  up  the  Arroyo. 
That  night,  she  filched  a  sheet  of  her  mother's  note  paper 
and  wrote  a  little  letter  to  Miss  Jackson  to  the  effect  that 
Beatrice  was  going  to  be  away  a  good  deal  for  the  next 
few  weeks  and  wouldn't  be  able  to  finish  this  term  of  les 
sons.  It  was  all  right,  though,  about  the  money,  and  she 
might  come  back  for  another  term  later.  With  the  unlost 
skill  of  long  experience,  she  signed  her  mother 's  name  and 
slipped  out  to  the  post-box  with  it. 

She  made  no  perceptible  progress  at  painting,  under 
Carmichael  Blair's  instruction.  With  pencil  she  did  a 
little  better,  but  not  much.  But  the  Blairs  between  them 
gave  her  more  real  education,  during  the  swift  months  of 
that  summer,  than  she'd  ever  got  before.  She  saw  one  or 
the  other  of  them  almost  daily.  She  made  uncounted  ex 
cursions  in  the  car,  with  Mike, — listening  to  his  talk  when 
he  was  in  the  mood  for  it;  silently  watching  him  paint 
when,  as  more  often  happened,  he  was  not.  She  spent 
whole  days  in  the  studio  or  the  bungalow,  reading,  when 
she  couldn't  get  Wanda  to  tell  her  stories  of  their  travels. 
One  may  say  it  was  during  that  summer  she  learned  to 
read,  as  anything  beyond  a  compulsory  academic  exer 
cise.  She  devoured  books  about  the  sea, — Captain  Mar- 
ryat  and  Clark  Russell:  Two  Tears  before  The  Mast  and 
The  Cruise  of  the  Cachalot.  She  read  The  Three  Muske 
teers,  and  made  a  start  on  Gil  Bias  (the  Blairs  had  it,  in 
French,  illustrated  with  marvelous  wood  cuts,  which  in 
spired  her  to  draw  an  English  translation  of  it  out  of  the 
Public  Library).  And  Rudyard  Kipling  burst  upon  her 
like  a  revelation. 

It  was  the  personal  quality  of  Mike  and  Wanda  that 
supplied  the  vital  spark  for  all  this.  They  had  voyaged 
long  weeks  over  distant  seas;  they'd  lived  in  Paris  and 
Rome  and  London;  they'd  been  in  Egypt  and  Siam  and 
India — knew  that  those  places  were  really  there.  They 


156         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

gave  actuality,  too,  to  the  newspaper  accounts  of  the 
progress  of  the  war.  Most  of  those  French  and  Belgian 
towns  that  figured  in  the  despatches  were  places  whose 
streets  they  had  walked. 

Broadly,  it  came  to  this :  they  rolled  up  the  curtains  of 
the  world,  her  own  world  to  some  extent  as  well  as  the 
wider  one.  It  was  possible,  somehow, — it  must  be  pos 
sible  because  they  managed  it — to  be  free  without  being 
outlaws.  In  time,  they  might  have  tamed  her  out  of  her 
cat-like  furtiveness,  but  that  one  summer's  acquaintance 
wasn't  long  enough. 

It  had  been  founded  upon  a  lie,  and,  upon  an  ascending 
progression  of  lies  to  her  mother,  it  was  maintained.  She 
wasn't  forced  to  lie  much  to  the  Blairs,  so  little  were  they 
addicted  to  prying  into  her  with  questions.  The  very 
sketchy  account  of  her  home  life  with  which  she  furnished 
them  satisfied  what  little  curiosity  they  showed. 

She'd  puzzled  Mike,  every  now  and  then,  by  an  ap 
parent  revival  of  her  interest  in  drawing.  She'd  take  a 
pencil  and  a  pad  and  start  something,  and  it  never  was 
very  hard  to  impose  on  his  simplicity  (she  had  an  uneasy 
feeling  that  Wanda  wasn't  quite  so  completely  taken  in) 
to  the  extent  of  getting  him  to  take  the  pencil  away  from 
her  and  show  her  how  the  thing  ought  to  be  done.  The 
product,  eighty  per  cent,  his  perhaps,  she  unobtrusively 
carried  off  and  exhibited  at  home  as  evidence  of  her  dili 
gence  and  progress  with  Miss  Jackson.  The  imposture 
wouldn't  have  worked  even  with  Annabel  if  it  had  not 
squared  with  her  hopes,  and  if  the  girl's  real  happiness 
had  not  produced,  in  minor  domestic  matters,  an  appear 
ance  of  docility. 

"What  brought  about  her  exposure  was  the  enthusiasm  of 
a  chance  caller  over  her  sketches.  The  unstinted  praise 
was  sweet  to  Annabel,  who  hadn't  thought  very  highly  of 
the  drawings  herself,  and  she  wrote  a  "nice  little  note"  to 
Miss  Jackson  and  invited  her  up  to  tea. 

Beatrice  had  known  she'd  get  caught  some  time,  but  she 
hadn  't  at  all  foreseen  how  painful  the  experience  was  going 


THE  CUB  157 

to  be,  nor  how  drastic  the  result  of  it.  She  'd  be  forbidden 
ever  to  see  the  Blairs  again  and,  no  doubt,  the  prohibition 
would  interfere,  for  a  while,  with  their  companionship. 
But  she  counted  on  them,  confidently,  as  resourceful  allies. 

It  was  to  this  expectation  she  anchored,  securely  she 
thought,  through  the  worst  domestic  tempest  she'd  ever 
experienced.  They  kept  her  prisoner  for  two  days,  by  the 
expedient  of  abstracting  her  clothes  while  she  slept  and 
locking  them  up;  and  during  this  time  her  grandfather 
sold  her  pony.  She  won  her  release  from  Annabel  under 
the  threat  of  escaping  into  the  street  in  her  nightgown,  a 
thing  which  she  was  resolutely  determined  to  do.  She 
went  straight  to  the  Blairs'  bungalow,  and  here  she  found 
bitter  disappointment. 

Blair  must  have  seen  her  coming  for  he  met  her  in  the 
yard.  "You  can't  come  here  any  more,  you  know,"  he 
said.  The  fact  that  his  tone  was,  superficially,  as  pleas 
ant  as  ever  made  it  all  the  more  unendurable.  "Your 
grandfather  came  to  see  us  last  night.  Told  us  all  about 
it.  He  made  us  feel,  Wanda  and  me,  like  about  fifteen 
cents  apiece.  You  see,  we  aren't  sneaks,  though  that's 
naturally  what  he  thought  we'd  been — about  you.  And 
we  can't  be  friends  with  people  who  tell  us  lies  and  who 
tell  lies  about  us." 

She  stood  staring  at  him,  speechless,  aghast.  She  knew 
she  was  going  to  cry,  for  the  first  time  almost  since  she 
could  remember. 

"I'm  sorry,"  he  concluded  at  the  end  of  a  pause  she 
couldn't  even  try  to  make  use  of,  "but  that's  all."  He 
turned  and  went  into  the  studio,  and  Beatrice  went  home, 
sobbing,  heedless  of  the  stares  and  the  sometimes  attempted 
questions  of  the  people  she  met  along  the  way. 

Her  only  protection  against  the  acid  of  Blair's  comment 
was  a  furious  anger  against  the  pair,  and  this  she  fanned 
into  flame  whenever  they  came  into  her  thoughts.  Meet 
ing  Wanda  on  the  street,  a  week  or  two  later,  she  passed 
her  without  a  nod  or  a  glance.  But  the  woman  turned  and 
walked  a  little  way  beside  her. 


158        JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"I'm  horribly  sorry  about  it  all,"  she  said.  "And 
Mike  is,  too.  I  think  he  took  it  a  little  too  hard,  but  he 
can't  help  that.  Anything  that  isn't  just  the  plain  truth 
is  poison  to  him." 

The  girl  gave  no  indication  that  she'd  heard. 

"In  one  way,"  Wanda  went  on,  after  they'd  walked  a 
few  paces  in  silence,  "it  doesn't  matter  so  much.  Be 
cause  we're  going  away  in  a  week  or  two,  anyhow.  "We're 
going  back  east  and  find  some  way  of  getting  into  the 
war."  Then,  "Good-by,  Beatrice." 

"Good-by,"  Beatrice  said  hoarsely.  But  she  didn't 
pause  nor  glance  around,  and  Wanda,  with  a  little  shrug 
ging  gesture,  turned  back. 

So  the  episode  ended  by  leaving  a  scar  of  real  cynicism 
upon  the  adolescent  spirit ;  a  scar  not  necessarily  indelible, 
but  not  to  be  removed  by  the  mere  lapse  of  time.  The 
years,  nearly  four,  between  the  going  away  of  the  Blairs 
and  Beatrice's  own  flight  to  Chicago,  had  no  healing  in 
them.  Rather  empty  uneventful  years  they  were,  dur 
ing  which  she  alternated  between  phases  of  weak  restless 
revolt  against  the  life  her  authorities  prescribed  for  her, 
and  a  sullen  acquiescence  in  it.  Sometimes  in  an  access 
of  energy,  she  would  read  or  study  furiously  for  a  few 
weeks.  She  had  a  spurt  or  two  of  activity  in  war  work,  in 
cited  mostly  by  the  fact  that  the  war  was  frowned  upon 
at  home.  She  drifted  along  through  high  school  and, 
after  five  years  of  desultory  attendance,  managed  to 
graduate. 

She  made  the  discovery  of  the  male  sex,  as  such,  rather 
late,  considering  her  precocity,  and,  during  the  last  two 
years  that  she  lived  with  her  mother,  most  of  her  talent 
for  intrigue  was  devoted  to  escapades — innocent  if  one 
uses  the  word  in  its  narrow  technical  sense,  but  not  very 
wholesome — with  schoolboys  and  young  men.  Her  atti 
tude  toward  them  was  meretricious  rather  than  romantic. 
A  boy  who  had  the  run  of  a  car,  and  was  pecunious  and 
liberal  enough  to  stand  excursions  into  Los  Angeles  or  out 
to  the  beaches,  was  a  desirable  possession,  to  be  kept  good- 


THE  CUB  159 

humored  and  interested  by  the  discreet  allowance  to  the 
sentimental,  semi-amorous  privileges  demanded.  She  was, 
in  the  main,  quite  frigid  about  all  this,  and  never  felt  the 
stir  of  any  desire  urgent  enough  to  be  alarming.  In  a 
shabby,  second-rate  sort  of  way,  she  became  rather  sophis 
ticated.  Her  spiritual  tone  was  pretty  well  established 
by  the  movies  which  she  assiduously  frequented. 

Her  grandmother's  death,  in  nineteen-eighteen,  gave 
her,  though  not  at  once,  an  idea  that  had  a  hope  behind  it. 
Her  grandfather,  some  time,  and  perhaps  before  very  long, 
would  die,  too;  when  that  happened  she  would  have  only 
her  mother  to  reckon  with.  And  Annabel  had  grown,  with 
every  passing  year,  less  formidable  to  her.  She  'd  be  able, 
she  believed,  to  make  her  mother  do  anything  she  liked. 

She  marked  the  appearance  of  a  Mr.  Hawthorne  Whit- 
tington  in  their  domestic  circle,  and  even  his  steadily  in 
creasing  importance,  without  very  serious  concern.  Her 
mild  dislike  of  him  was  spiced  by  a  contemptuous  amuse 
ment.  Though  it  was  several  years  since  he  'd  retired  from 
the  lecture  platform  to  his  lemon  grove,  he'd  kept  a  pub 
lic  manner — the  sort  of  air  that  made  people  say  after 
he  'd  passed,  ' '  Who  was  that  ? ' ' — and  a  love  for  the  center 
of  the  stage,  and  these  harmless  weaknesses  provided  Bea 
trice  with  moments  of  amusement  at  his  expense.  It  was 
fun  to  reduce  him  to  helpless,  because  inexpressible,  wrath 
with  a  well-placed  interruption,  or  to  see  how  blank  he 
looked  when  she  caused  one  of  his  well-oiled  witticisms  to 
miss  fire  by  taking  him  literally.  Even  after  his  visits 
had  come  to  be  almost  daily  affairs,  she  didn't  surmise  that 
his  dislike,  or  hatred,  could  ever  be  important  to  her. 

It  was  a  lawyer's  visit  to  the  house,  one  evening,  that 
frightened  her.  The  falsely  casual  attempt  to  give  it  the 
air  of  a  social  call,  a  reference,  by  the  man,  to  "the  little 
matter"  he  and  her  mother  had  to  talk  about,  Annabel's 
flutters  and  the  solemnity  of  the  withdrawal  into  the 
dining-room  and  the  shutting  of  the  door,  all  were  por 
tentous.  Beatrice,  left  alone  on  the  veranda  with  her 
grandfather,  felt  a  sudden  sinking  of  the  heart.  Some- 


160         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

thing  was  happening  that  she  must  know  about,  at  once, 
but  she  'd  gain  no  knowledge  from  that  old  man  by  asking 
questions. 

She  rose  and  lounged  across  to  the  rail,  where,  without 
turning,  he  could  not  watch  her.  Then  she  laughed. 
"Isn't  mother  funny!"  she  said. 

"Funny!"  her  grandfather  growled.  "She's  doing  it 
for  you." 

"She  needn't,"  said  the  girl. 

"No,  I  s'pose  not,"  he  sneered.  "But  she's  going  to, 
and  it'll  be  a  good  thing  for  you.  I'm  going  to  die  before 
long.  And  you  do  need  somebody.  Younger 'n  I  am — 
and  stronger.  If  it  wasn't  for  that  I  wouldn't  let  her  do 
it.  Foolish  risk,  any  time.  Nonsense,  at  her  age.  But 
this  one  ain't  a  limb  of  Satan — and  that's  what  the  other 
one  was." 

"You  mean  my  father?"  Beatrice  asked. 

The  question  roused  the  old  man  from  his  soliloquy.  He 
hadn't  consciously  been  talking  to  her  at  all.  He  turned 
and  eyed  her  suspiciously;  then  told  her  she'd  better  go 
to  bed. 

She  went,  not  unwillingly,  having  got  enough  to  keep 
her  mind  occupied  for  a  while.  Next  morning,  finding  her 
mother  alone,  she  asked,  casually,  "How  long  does  it  take 
to  get  a  divorce,  mother!" 

Annabel's  embroidery  scissors  flew  out  of  her  hand;  her 
face  flamed.  "Who  told  you?"  she  demanded  in  a  panic. 

Beatrice  surprised  them  all  by  taking  the  prospective 
revolution  so  quietly.  It  was,  in  fact,  much  too  serious  a 
matter  for  anything  so  ineffectual  as  threats  and  rages. 
Hawthorne  Whittington  as  a  stepfather  would  make  life 
intolerable;  before  the  marriage  took  place,  she  would 
run  away.  But  she  wasted  no  moves  by  serving  notice 
of  her  intention.  She  had  her  picture  taken  and  began 
stringing  her  wires  for  Hollywood. 

Joe's  letter,  though  it  reduced  her  for  an  hour  or  two 
to  a  state  of  dazed  and  almost  helpless  excitement,  drew 
from  her  no  gush  of  affection  for  him,  like  water  smitten 


THE  CUB  161 

miraculously  from  the  rock.  It  didn't  even  restore  him 
as  the  romantic  rescuer  who  had  been,  a  few  years  back,  so 
constantly  the  hero  of  her  day-dreams.  She  thought  of 
him — as  soon  as  the  recession  of  the  first  flurry  made  it 
possible  for  her  to  think  at  all — a  little  resentfully  and 
quite  cynically,  as  a  stranger ;  a  man  like  all  men,  a  tyrant 
if  he  could  get  a  chance  to  be,  and  a  bargainer  not  inclined 
to  give  something  for  nothing.  He  had  some  motive,  un- 
avowed,  in  breaking  this  silence  of  twenty  years  and  send 
ing  for  her  now. 

She  had  sensed  in  his  letter  the  patronizing  note;  the 
fact  that  she  was  being  talked  down  to,  as  a  little  girl — 
innocent,  ignorant,  easy  to  control.  And  this  observation 
gave  her  her  line:  the  thing  to  do  with  a  man  like  that 
was  to  get  the  jump  on  him,  surprise  him,  keep  him  guess 
ing.  It  was  deliberately  a  part  of  her  campaign  that  she 
demanded  the  whole  of  the  thousand  dollars,  and,  for  a 
fortnight,  disappeared  with  it.  If  he  demanded  explana 
tions,  she  would  refuse  them  as  insolently  as  possible. 
Whatever  happened,  she  must  bluff  it  out ;  she  must  never 
let  him  see  that  she  was  frightened. 

4 

The  tears  she  saw  in  her  father's  eyes,  when  she'd  kissed 
him  over  their  first  breakfast,  obliterated  the  fear  that 
she'd  be  shipped  back  to  Pasadena  as  unsatisfactory;  as 
his  forbearance,  the  evening  before,  had  made  it  plain 
that  she  wouldn't  have  to  run  away  from  him.  They'd 
"get  on"  all  right.  And  the  menage  she  found  him  in, 
as  well  as  the  place  he  seemed  to  offer  her  in  it,  was  far 
beyond  the  wildest  of  her  hopes.  The  "good  flat"  and 
the  two  cars  he  had  mentioned  in  his  letter  had  suggested 
no  such  establishment  as  this.  Anson — dignified,  in 
scrutable,  sophisticated,  and,  implicitly  at  least,  under  her 
orders — was  as  incredible  as  if  he'd  come  out  of  the  mov 
ies.  And  Burns,  the  chauffeur — her  chauffeur,  in  effect, 
since  her  father  seemed  never  to  require  his  services  by  day, 
—was  as  good-looking  and  jolly  and  serviceable  to  her 


162         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

caprice  as  any  of  the  young  princes  of  Hollywood  who 
sometimes  disguised  themselves  in  jobs  like  that,  for  a  lark 
— or  a  purpose. 

The  car  she  elected  to  do  most  of  her  driving  in  was  not 
the  sumptuous  monster  in  which  Joe  had  taken  her  down 
to  dinner  on  that  first  evening,  but  a  sport  model  of  the 
same  famous  make.  Her  first  edict  was  that  she  be  al 
lowed  to  learn  to  drive  it.  They  made  daily  cruises,  she 
and  young  Burns,  of  uncounted  miles  and  unreckoned 
hours.  She  even  liked  the  country.  The  color  and  fresh 
ness  and  variety  of  the  foliage  excited  her,  accustomed  as 
she  was  to  the  palmetto-punctuated  monotony  of  southern 
California. 

Most  of  the  time  during  those  first  few  days,  she  felt 
like  Ali  Baba  when  he  had  first  said,  "Open  sesame!" 
But,  again  like  Ali  Baba,  she  wras  to  experience  no  comfort 
able  security  in  the  possession  of  her  treasure  trove. 
There  were  enigmas  about  her  father's  life  she  couldn't 
solve ;  alarms  that  kept  her  constantly  on  the  alert. 

She'd  stumbled  upon  the  first  of  these  the  morning  Joe 
took  her  to  the  office.  He'd  introduced  her  round  promis 
cuously,  during  the  ostensible  process  of  showing  her  over 
the  place,  to  all  sorts  of  people, — draughtsmen,  clerks, 
stenographers — usually  in  a  perfectly  one-sided  manner: 
' '  This  is  my  daughter,  Beatrice  " ;  of  course,  it  didn  't  mat 
ter  to  her  who  they  were. 

But  to  this  procedure  there  had  been  a  striking  excep 
tion.  On  leading  her  up  to  one  young  woman, — a  creature 
with  some  pretense  to  looks  and  a  lot  of  red  hair ;  probably 
some  sort  of  head  stenographer  since  she  seemed  to  have  an 
office  of  her  own, — her  father  had  said,  "Beatrice,  this  is 
Jennie  MacArthur. ' '  He  'd  said  it,  too,  on  a  different  note, 
significantly  somehow,  and  the  significance  seemed  to  be 
that  here  was  somebody  who,  for  an  unguessed  reason,  did 
matter.  He  added,  as  if  to  put  it  beyond  doubt,  "I  want 
you  two  to  get  acquainted." 

Beatrice,  startled  and  feeling  herself  flushed,  managed 
a  rather  cavalier  nod  and  an  abbreviated  "How  do  you 


THE  CUB  163 

do";  and  then,  though  she  hadn't  meant  to,  extended  her 
hand. 

The  woman  didn't  act  snubbed  at  all,  though  the  in 
tention,  Beatrice  thought,  had  been  plain  enough.  Her 
look  was  penetrating  and  deliberate.  "We're  very  glad 
you've  come,"  she  said.  Then,  turning  to  him — her  em 
ployer,  "Congratulations!"  She  didn't  merely  say  it, 
either;  she  put  something  into  it,  some  special  meaning. 

There 'd  been  conversation — disjointed,  rather  at  ran 
dom — after  this ;  questions  about  the  sort  of  trip  she  'd  had 
across  the  continent ;  a  brief  account  of  what  they  'd  done 
the  night  before. 

At  last  she  said,  amazingly:  "There's  nothing  much 
here  this  morning,  Joe.  Why  don't  you  take  the  day 
off?" 

Though  he  vetoed  the  suggestion  bruskly, — there  was 
something  he  particularly  wanted  to  get  at — he  didn't 
seem  to  feel  that  there 'd  been  anything  officious  about  it. 
And  the  "Joe"  neither  of  them  seemed  to  have  been  con 
scious  of,  at  all.  Evidently  it  was  what  she  called  him. 

Who  was  she?  What  was  she?  What  was  her — hold 
on  him,  and  how  had  she  managed  to  get  it? 

She  thought  her  father  acted,  now,  as  if  he'd  still  like 
to  stay  longer,  but  was  conscious  of  being  turned  out.  He 
said,  "Well,  we  won't  bother  you  any  more,  now, 
but  ..." 

Jennie  MacArthur  nodded  an  easy  farewell  to  the  girl. 
"Oh,  we'll  get  acquainted  all  right  in  time,"  she  said. 

Beatrice  was  too  wary  to  ask  her  father  any  questions, 
and  to  his,  that  night  at  dinner — what  did  she  think  of 
Jennie  MacArthur;  how  had  she  liked  her? — her  replies 
had  been  colorless  enough,  she  thought,  to  give  him  no  hint 
of  her  surmise. 

Casually,  in  the  course  of  a  driving  lesson,  she  put  a 
question  or  two  to  Burns.  Who  was  the  good-looking 
woman  in  the  office,  with  red  hair? 

Miss  MacArthur?  Oh,  yes,  he  knew  her.  Very  pleas 
ant  she  was,  and  smart,  too,  he  guessed.  He  understood 


164         JOSEPH  GEEER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

she  was  secretary  of  the  company.  She  lived  up  in  Edge- 
water.  He'd  driven  her  home  once  or  twice  when  her 
own  car  had  been  out  of  commission. 

She  had  a  car,  then,  Beatrice  commented. 

He  qualified  this.     It  was  a  flivver  coupe. 

"Home  from  where?"  Beatrice  asked.  "Does  she 
ever  come  to  our  house  ? ' ' 

"I  couldn't  say  as  to  that,"  he  answered,  and  it  struck 
her  that  his  manner  was  a  little  artificially  discreet.  Not 
even  the  thrill  of  learning  to  run  the  big  car  could  drive 
the  problem  out  of  her  mind. 

But  it  was  pretty  well  supplanted,  a  few  days  later,  by 
another,  more  serious.  Her  father,  as  they  were  leaving 
the  breakfast  table,  said  to  Anson:  "Mr.  Craven  and  his 
sister  are  dining  with  us  to-night.  No  one  else." 

She  perceived,  from  the  moment  of  real  attention  he  gave 
the  butler's  question  as  to  what  wine  they  should  have, 
that  the  dinner  wasn't  quite  the  casual  thing  his  offhand 
announcement  of  it  was  meant  to  make  it  appear.  (Wine 
hadn't  been  an  item  at  their  dinners,  nor  even,  since  that 
first  night  at  the  Blackstone,  cocktails.  Her  father  helped 
himself  to  whisky  out  of  a  carafe,  but  never  offered  any 
to  her.)  She  asked,  when  he  was  on  the  point  of  going 
off  without  telling  her,  who  the  Cravens  were. 

"Why,  you  met  Henry,  that  day  at  the  office,"  he  said. 
"He's  treasurer  of  the  company." 

"Was  he  the  smallish  man  with  eye-glasses?"  she  asked. 
And,  at  his  nod,  "Is  he  a  particular  friend  of  yours?" 

There  was  something  she  took  as  not  quite  serious  about 
his  answer.  "Sure  he  is.  Henry  and  I  have  cottoned  up 
in  great  style. ' '  He  hesitated,  then  went  on,  more  soberly : 
"His  sister  Margaret's  a  mighty  fine  woman.  You  want 
to  make  a  good  impression  on  her."  At  the  door,  he 
turned  back  to  say:  "Better  wear  your  little  blue  dress, 
I  guess.  More  the  thing  for  a  small  family  dinner  than 
the  red  one." 

She  was  in  two  minds,  during  the  day,  whether  she 
wouldn  't  defy  him  here,  by  way  of  establishing  a  principle 


THE  CUB  165 

she  was  in  danger  of  allowing  to  lapse.  But  a  misgiving, 
picked  up  she  knew  not  where,  about  that  rose-colored  cos 
tume,  which  had  looked  so  desirably  smart  in  the  Market 
Street  shop,  led  her  to  follow  her  father 's  suggestion.  For 
a  few  minutes  after  their  guests  arrived,  she  was  glad  she 
had  done  so.  She  sniffed  danger  in  the  wind,  and  until 
it  had  passed  she  didn't  want  her  hands  tied  by  a  quarrel, 
no  matter  how  trivial,  with  her  father. 

She  couldn't  have  said  just  what  it  was  that  made  her 
uneasy,  but  her  pitiless  young  eyes  saw,  beneath  Margaret 's 
surface  suavity,  something  haggard.  It  betrayed  itself 
in  the  corners  of  her  eyelids  and  in  the  tightness  of  her 
throat  muscles.  It  could  be  heard,  sometimes,  in  the  wire 
edge  of  a  word — addressed,  usually,  to  her  brother,  or 
when,  with  what  was  meant  to  sound  like  pure  good 
humor,  she  told  stories  at  his  expense.  She  was  old  and 
tired  and,  for  some  reason  only  to  be  guessed,  not  far 
from  desperate. 

But,  all  the  more  for  that,  she  was  formidable.  Over 
the  cocktails  in  the  drawing-room  she  had  addressed  her 
host  as  Joe,  but  without — quite — Jennie  MacArthur's  un 
consciousness.  A  gleam  in  his  eye  told  the  girl  that  he 
had  noted  it,  too,  with  interest  and  perhaps  with  pleasure. 
So  it  must  have  been  the  first  time.  The  woman  hadn't 
done  it  idly;  nothing  she  did  was  idle. 

Beatrice  contented  herself  with  a  single  sip  at  her  glass ; 
then  carried  it  over  to  her  father.  ''I  ought  to  have  done 
this,  last  time,"  she  admitted  confidentially,  and  he 
squeezed  her  arm  in  approval.  But  when  Margaret  took  a 
cigarette,  she  helped  herself  to  one  also.  She  'd  had  a  fort 
night  of  assiduous  practise  and  decided  she  could  safely 
venture.  He  laughed  at  this  bit  of  bravado,  but  didn't 
seem  displeased.  She  felt  it  was  a  good  beginning;  her 
father's  darling  and  the  complete  hostess  were  the  two 
fronts  she  wished  to  present, — a  double  warning  to  tres 
passers. 

And  as  the  evening  advanced,  she  gained  confidence  that 
she  was  succeeding  with  both.  She  sat  very  straight,  in 


166         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

the  high-backed  armchair  which  faced  her  father's,  and 
felt  herself  satisfactorily  in  the  part  (the  movies  have  their 
uses,  after  all.  She'd  learned  a  lot  from  Pauline  Fred 
erick  and  Elsie  Ferguson).  Anson  fortified  her  somehow; 
it  was  the  first  time  she'd  felt  him  clearly  as  an  ally. 
But  the  great  thing  was  her  father's  look.  Something 
came  into  it,  whenever  he  turned  it  upon  her,  that  quick 
ened  her  heartbeat.  As  long  as  he  went  on  looking  at  her 
like  that  she  was  in  no  danger  from  anybody. 

Their  hour  in  the  drawing-room  after  dinner  was  really 
rather  jolly,  and  one  of  her  few  conversational  ventures, 
made  in  the  course  of  it,  proved  a  distinct  success.  Miss 
Craven  had  been  admiring  the  big  Sorolla,  when  Beatrice 
asked,  "Did  you  ever  hear  of  a  painter  named  Carmichael 
Blair?" 

They'd  all  heard  of  him,  it  seemed.  He'd  had  a  show, 
only  a  few  months  earlier,  at  the  Institute.  But  why  had 
she  asked? 

"Some  of  his  pictures  are  a  little  like  that,  I  think," 
she  said.  "They — sort  of  sing,  just  like  that  does." 

In  that  moment  she  decided  that,  without  reserve,  she 
liked  Henry  Craven,  just  for  the  way  his  face  lighted  up 
over  this  remark.  "You're  perfectly  right,"  he  told  her; 
"there's  a  real  resemblance,  in  just  that  quality."  He 
added,  "Blair  lived  out  in  California  for  a  while,  didn't 
he?" 

She  nodded.  "He  tried  to  teach  me  to  paint,  once. 
But  I  wasn't  much  good  at  it."  She  had  the  satisfaction 
of  feeling  that  she'd  said  that  exactly  right. 

So  the  evening  summed  up  to  a  real  success.  Her  com 
ments  on  their  guests,  after  they  'd  gone,  were  enthusiastic ; 
genuine,  as  they  concerned  Henry,  and  so  nearly  in  the 
same  tone  as  they  concerned  Margaret  that  she  didn't  be 
lieve  her  father  could  tell  the  difference. 

But  the  little  lunch  Margaret  had  for  her,  a  week  later, 
didn't  go  off  so  well,  and  she  came  home  from  it  de 
pressed,  vaguely  resentful,  and  with  her  first  misgiving 
of  the  woman's  design  upon  her  father  wide  awake  again. 


THE  CUB  167 

Margaret 's  flat  had  been  a  shock  to  her.  She  'd  assumed 
that  these  people  were  rich, — in  the  circle  of  big  bankers 
her  father  had  spoken  of  in  his  letter.  But  they  couldn't 
be;  they  were  poor;  the  flat  was  small,  the  furniture  old- 
fashioned,  and  the  only  servant  in  evidence  might  have 
been  one  in  her  mother's  endless  succession  out  in  Pasa 
dena.  She  wondered,  uneasily,  if  her  father  had  been 
taken  in. 

The  shabbiness  of  the  setting  in  which  she  was  revealed 
didn't  lessen  at  all  her  hostess's  assurance;  heightened  it, 
if  anything.  She  seemed  cooler  and  harder,  as  well  as — 
somehow — more  mechanical,  than  on  the  night  she  and 
her  brother  had  come  to  dinner.  Beatrice  was  the  first 
of  the  guests  to  arrive  and  during  those  few  minutes  while 
they  were  alone  she  had  the  uncomfortable  sense  of  being 
under  examination;  on  trial — to  have  it  decided  whether 
she  would  do!  The  questions  themselves  were  friendly 
enough.  How  did  she  amuse  herself  during  the  long, 
hours  her  father  spent  at  the  office?  (Margaret  knew 
how  long  they  were,  because  of  her  brother.)  Had  she 
any  trouble  finding  her  way  about?  Had  she  been  shop 
ping  ?  Margaret  wrould  go  with  her  if  she  liked,  almost  any 
day,  and  show  her  where — well,  the  right  sort  of  things, 
were  to  be  found.  One  could  waste  a  lot  of  time — as  well 
as  a  lot  of  money — in  a  strange  city,  making  all  those  dis 
coveries  for  one's  self.  No,  there  was  no  harm  in  the 
questions; — only  the  girl's  answers  seemed,  always,  some 
how,  to  give  her  away. 

The  arrival  of  the  other  guests  didn't  improve  matters, 
either.  There  were  only  two  of  them  (it  wasn't  a  party, 
Margaret  explained),  young  girls  of  aboutxher  own  age. 
After  the  buzzer  had  announced  them  in  the  vestibule,  her 
hostess  teld  her,  swiftly,  wrho  they  were.  One  was  Dor 
othy  Williamson,  whose  father  had  gone  in  with  hers  in 
the  new  flax  business  She  had  got  back,  only  the  week 
before,  from  her  school,  Thornycroft,  in  the  East.  The 
other  was  her  particular  friend,  Sylvia  Stannard.  Syl 
via's  people  had  a  place  at  Lake  Geneva,  but  her  brother 


168         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

had  lately  bought  a  farm,  out  on  the  Elgin  road,  in  which 
she  was  taking  a  passionate  interest,  and  her  conversation, 
unless  she  was  summarily  dealt  with,  was  likely  to  be, 
heavily  agricultural.  "If  she  talks  about  Duroc- Jerseys" 
— Margaret  finished  the  sentence  though  the  two  girls  were 
now  coming  into  the  room — "don't  think  she  means  cows. 
She  caught  me  that  way,  the  other  day." 

From  the  first  moment,  in  the  mere  acknowledgment  of 
the  introduction,  they  disconcerted  Beatrice,  though  she 
couldn't  be  sure  they  meant  to.  At  least,  they  didn't 
sneer  nor  toss  their  heads  nor  turn  their  shoulders  upon 
her,  the  way  the  thing  was  done  in  the  movies.  But  she 
couldn't  get  in  step  with  them.  Their  easy,  rather  jolly 
talk  gave  her  no  handles  to  hold  on  by.  Miss  Craven,  every 
now  and  then,  threw  her  what  was  plainly  meant  for  a 
life-line,  but  when  she  tried  to  take  these  leads  and  ven 
tured  out  of  her  shell  of  silence,  it  was  into  a  vacuum. 
They  were  both  younger  than  she,  she  decided,  and  neither 
was  as  much  dressed-up.  She  was  confident  that  she 
knew  more  about  a  lot  of  things  than  they  did.  "When  a 
telephone  call  took  their  hostess  out  of  the  room,  for 
quite  a  long  while,  the  vacuum  got  higher  than  ever. 
They  didn't  talk  about  men  at  all,  even  with  this  oppor 
tunity,  and  Beatrice's  attempt  to  introduce  the  topic  was, 
as  her  instinct  had  warned  her  it  would  be,  a  failure. 

"I  think  Henry  Craven's  a  peach!"  Beatrice  had  vol 
unteered,  apropos  of  something  that  had  been  said  about 
Margaret.  "I  had  a  lot  of  fun  with  him  at  dinner  the 
other  night."  Then,  uneasily  aware  that  both  the  ofher 
girls  were  looking  a  bit  blank,  she  added,  "You  know  him, 
don't  you?" 

"Rather!"  the  Williamson  girl  answered.  "He's  my 
cousin.  Yes,  he's  a  lamb." 

Beatrice  flushed  and  looked  away;  it  was  as  if  a  door 
had  been  shut  in  her  face. 

Later,  after  Margaret  had  come  back,  the  talk  veered  to 
plans  for  the  summer.  Margaret  and  Portia  Novelli  were 
taking  the  Aldrichs'  cottage  on  Cape  Cod  (Portia's  hus- 


THE  CUB  169 

band  was  going  to  be  busy  all  summer  at  Ravinia).  Mar 
garet  said  in  a  casual  but  friendly  way  to  Beatrice,  "You 
ought  to  come  down  and  see  us.  Get  acquainted  with  the 
Atlantic  Ocean  as  well  as  the  Pacific.  It  isn't  so  big,  but 
it's  rather  nice." 

Sylvia  meant  to  spend  most  of  the  summer — all  of  it, 
unless  her  mother  got  too  unpleasant  about  it — with  the 
boys  on  the  farm. 

Dorothy  yawned.  "I've  a  hunch  that  we're  going  to 
have  a  little  barytone  in  our  home  this  summer.  We  met 
him  last  week,  in  New  York.  He's  signed  up  for  the  Ra 
vinia  season.  He  doesn't  speak  any  English,  and  Violet's 
French  is  rather  funny  round  the  edges,  so  I  suppose  I'll 
be  kept  standing  by  most  of  the  time,  to  see  that  they 
don't  get  tangled  up." 

"Is  Violet  your  sister?"  Beatrice  asked. 

"Mother,"  said  Dorothy,  and  Sylvia  giggled. 

"Really,  Dorothy,  that's  outrageous,"  Margaret  re 
monstrated. 

"Well,  she's  the  one  that  makes  me  do  it,"  was  Dorothy's 
retort. 

There  broke  over  Beatrice  a  wave  of  something  like 
homesickness.  Home  had  never  been  a  place  she'd  con 
sciously  loved.  She'd  never  found  much  sympathy  or 
security  in  it ;  nor  anything  better  than  meager  and  un 
satisfying  spiritual  fare  in  the  world  that  surrounded  it. 
But  its  inhabitants  and  their  codes  and  standards  were, 
after  all,  familiar  and  intelligible  to  her.  These  people 
were  aliens.  They  left  her  out,  not  so  much  from  malice 
as  from  the  lack  of  any  connective  medium.  She  glanced 
round,  desperately,  at  the  clock;  it  would  be  almost  an 
hour  before  Burns  would  call  for  her  with  the  car.  Luck 
ily,  the  other  guests  went  earlier,  and  she  experienced  a 
certain  relief  at  being  left  alone  with  Miss  Craven. 

Just  as  she  was  leaving,  the  invitation  for  a  visit  to  the 
Cape  Cod  cottage  was  repeated,  this  time  in  a  way  to 
show  that  it  was  meant  and  must  be,  in  some  fashion,  dealt 
with. 


170         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"Why,  it's  frightfully  kind  of  you,"  Beatrice  said.  "I 
don't  think  father  means  me  to  go  away  again  as  soon  as 
this. — I  've  just  come,  you  see.  But  I  '11  speak  to  him  about 
it." 

"Do!"  said  Margaret.  "If  he's  going  to  be  away  him 
self  any  time  this  summer,  up  in  the  Northwest  where 
they're  building  their  flax  factories,  it  might  just  fit  in." 

5 

Beatrice  awaited  his  return  from  the  office  that  evening 
with  an  emotion  that  was  more  filial  and  domestic  than 
anything  she  had  felt  toward  him  before.  She  had  never, 
from  the  first  moment,  been  indifferent  to  him.  Her 
scheme  for  keeping  the  whip  hand  of  him  by  an  alteration 
of  cajolery  and  defiance  had  fallen  to  pieces  when  he  re 
jected  her  first  proffered  kiss  and  told  her  why.  He'd 
frightened  her  since  then,  he'd  quickened  her  heartbeat, 
he'd  made  himself,  once  more,  the  center  of  her  thoughts 
and  dreams;  he'd  given  her,  in  some  ecstatic  moments,  a 
vertiginous  sense  of  conquest.  But  until  she  came  home, 
depressed  and  forlorn,  from  Margaret  Craven's  lunch,  she 
had  never  waited  for  him  as  an  inseparable  ally,  a  bringer 
of  security  and  confidence. 

She'd  hoped  he  would  be  early — something  he'd  said 
that  morning  had  led  her  to  think  he  might  be, — but  his 
regular  time  passed  and  the  better  part  of  an  hour  after 
that  before  she  heard  Anson  letting  him  in,  and  by  then 
she  was  on  the  verge  of  tears.  Unluckily,  too,  he  came  to 
her  full  of  something — some  idea  or  plan  or  triumph — of 
his  own.  He  was  very  jovial  about  it,  whatever  it  was, 
and  the  hug  and  the  kiss  he  gave  her,  though  vigorous  and 
enthusiastic,  lacked  the  tenderness  she,  for  the  first  time, 
wanted.  She  released  herself  with  a  movement  of  petu 
lance  which  caught  his  attention. 

"What's  the  matter  with  you?"  he  asked.  "Getting 
lonesome  ? ' ' 

The  tone  of  the  question,  good-natured  as  it  was,  didn't 
invite  confidences.  She  felt  no  real  concern  in  it.  So 


THE  CUB  171 

she  scolded  him  for  being  late;  erected  his  casual  predic 
tion  of  that  morning  into  a  promise,  that  he'd  be  home 
early. 

"I'm  sorry  about  that,  Trix,"  he  said.  (This  was  the 
nickname  she'd  elected.)  "I  started  out  all  right,  but  I 
got  caught  by  something  unexpected.  Damn  unexpected ! ' ' 
he  added,  mostly  to  himself. 

But  she  heard  it,  and  with  a  resentful  glance  made  sure 
that  the  unexpected  thing  had  still  the  principal  place  in 
his  thoughts.  She  wouldn't  give  him  the  satisfaction  of 
asking  him  what  it  was. 

"I'll  make  it  up  to  you  now,  though,"  he  went  on. 
"What  can  you  think  of  that  it  would  be  fun  to  do?  I 
guess  we've  seen  most  of  the  shows,  but  if  you  want  to 
repeat  on  any  of  them,  I'm  game.  And  there's  still  time 
to  go  down-town  to  dinner.  "We  won't  stop  to  dress;  you 
look  great,  just  as  you  are." 

"You  hate  that  red  dress  of  mine, — I  know  you  do," 
she  said.  "I  guess  you're  ashamed  of  me  in  it."  Her 
voice  broke  over  that  and  betrayed  the  fact  that  she  was 
crying. 

There  was  a  long  moment  before  he  made  any  response 
at  all.  She  had  a  sense  of  him,  for  she  didn  't  turn  to  look, 
standing  unnaturally  still  and  not  looking  at  her.  Then, 
without  warning,  for  he  moved  lightly  and  the  rugs  were 
soft,  she  felt  his  hands  upon  her.  Of  her  weak  resistance 
and  her  broken,  "No,  let  me  alone,"  he  took  no  account  at 
all,  but  picked  her  up  bodily,  carried  her  to  his  special 
big  chair  and  sat  down  in  it  with  her  in  his  lap. 

"Put  your  head  down,"  he  said,  in  his  vibrant  voice, 
"and  cry  as  long  as  you  like.  And  then,  when  you're 
ready,  tell  me  all  about  it." 

She  didn't  want  to  cry  any  more — indeed,  surprise  at 
being  taken  up  like  that  had  checked  her  tears, — but 
neither  did  she  want  to  talk.  She  had,  for  just  that 
moment,  no  sense  of  grievance,  against  him  or  against  the 
world.  Everything  else  was  swallowed  up  in  the  sensa 
tion  of  his  comprehensive  embrace ;  nothing  even  remotely 


172 

like  that  had,  in  the  whole  length  of  her  memory,  hap 
pened  to  her  before. 

This  didn't  last  long.  Her  consciousness,  so  deeply- 
submerged  in  this  new  element,  came  floating  to  the  sur 
face  again.  She  was  aware  of  the  prickle  of  his  beard 
upon  her  wet  face ;  she  wondered  if  he  was  smiling. 

"I  expect  it's  just  lonesomeness  that  made  you  feel  that 
way, ' '  he  said,  and  she  noted,  even  then,  something  forced 
in  his  tone  of  reassurance,  as  if  he  were  managing  a  small 
child.  ''You've  been  sitting  around  by  yourself  all  day, 
with  nothing  to  do  and  nobody  to  talk  to.  We'll  have  to 
tackle  that  problem,  somehow." 

She  told  him,  without  raising  her  head,  that  this  was  a 
bad  guess.  It  hadn't  been  an  unoccupied  day,  at  all. 
She'd  gone  to  a  party. 

"Margaret  Craven's  lunch,"  he  said.  "I  know."  (She 
was  sure,  though,  that  he'd  forgotten  all  about  it.)  "But 
I  guess  you  can  feel  lonesomer  at  a  party  than  anywhere 
else,  if  things  don't  go  just  right.  What  went  wrong  this 
time?" 

"Oh,  nothing  much,"  she  said,  over  a  catch  that  had 
come  back  into  her  breathing.  She  wished  he  wouldn't 
ask  her  questions;  just  go  on,  holding  her  still.  Again 
she  felt,  from  the  movement  of  his  beard,  that  he  was 
smiling. 

' '  Did  you  wear  the  wrong  sort  of  hat  ? "  he  asked. 

"I  guess  so,"  she  agreed  dully.  "She  as  good  as  told 
me  so." 

"Oh,  damn!"  she  heard  Joe  murmur.  Then,  with  an 
edge  in  his  voice,  "You  don't  mean  she  was  really — im 
polite  to  you,  unfriendly?" 

"Oh,  no;  she  was  all  right,"  Beatrice  told  him.  "She 
offered  to  take  me  shopping  with  her.  Show  me  where 
I  could  get  'the  right  sort  of  things,'  as  if  she  could  see 
plain  enough  mine  weren't.  I  suppose  that's  what  you 
think,  too. — I  wish  you  would  go  shopping  with  me." 

"What  makes  you  think  I  know  anything  about  women's 
clothes  ? "  he  demanded,  but  in  a  tone  she  recognized  as  not 


THE  CUB  173 

serious.  It  had  a  joke  in  it  for  his  private  enjoyment.  Of 
course,  he'd  probably  bought  clothes  for  all  sorts  of  women, 
but  that  wasn't  the  sort  of  thing  he'd  expect  her  to  guess. 

"You  want  to  take  up  that  offer  of  hers,"  he  said,  after 
a  silence.  "She's  a  mighty  well-dressed  woman  herself, 
and  she  hasn't  had  much  to  do  it  on,  I  guess.  I'm  sure 
she  meant  it  in  a  friendly  way.  And  she  could  give  you 
the  right  dope  about  lots  of  things." 

"I  don't  care  whether  it's  the  right  dope  or  not,"  she 
persisted.  "I  don't  want  her  telling  me  what  to  wear. 
I  want  you  to. ' '  She  slipped  her  free  arm  round  his  mas 
sive  shoulder.  "Will  you  go  shopping  with  me,  dad?" 
she  said.  ' '  You  '11  know  what  you  like  anyhow,  and  that 's 
all  I  care  about." 

He  hugged  her  up  tighter  at  that.  ' '  All  right, ' '  he  said, 
"it's  a  bargain.  "We'll  go  some  day,  the  first  chance  we 
get."  There  was  silence  for  a  while  after  that,  but  he 
hadn't,  as  she  hoped,  done  with  the  luncheon.  "Did  she 
have  anything  else  to  say?"  he  asked,  and  the  girl  per 
versely  asked,  "Who?" 

"Why,  Margaret  Craven." 

She  thought  he'd  hesitated  a  little  over  the  use  of  the 
name.  "Oh,  nothing  much,"  she  told  him. 

He  waited  for  more;  then  he  asked  who  else  was  at  the 
party. 

It  wasn't  a  real  party,  she  said.  There  were  only  two 
other  girls  besides  herself.  One  of  them  was  named  Stan- 
nard — Sylvia  Stannard;  she  pretended  to  be  crazy  about 
farming.  And  the  other  was  Dorothy  Williamson. 

"What's  she  like?"  The  question  was  asked  on  so  dif 
ferent  a  note,  with  such  an  appearance  of  personal  con 
cern,  that  Beatrice  sat  erect  and  looked  at  him.  "Why," 
he  explained,  "she's  Williamson's  daughter,  that's  gone 
into  business  with  me.  He's  got  a  picture  of  her,  a  chalk, 
on  the  wall  of  his  office.  Very  pretty  girl  I'd  have  said 
from  that.  Anyhow,  I'd  like  you  to  make  friends  with 
her." 

"Well,  I  'm  not  likely  to, ' '  she  said.     ' '  She 's  a  little  up- 


174         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

stage  snip,  that 's  what  she  is.  And  she  isn  't  pretty, — that 
is,  not  very.  I  got  enough  of  her  to-day  to  last  me  a  long 
time. ' '  She  rose  from  his  knees  at  that,  and  walked  away, 
noting  that  he  had  made  no  effort  to  detain  her. 

"Look  here,  Trix,"  he  said,  at  last,  "we  want  to  get 
things  straight.  Don't  want  to  make  any  mistakes  right 
at  the  start.  I  think  it's  a  safe  bet  that  that  girl  will 
treat  you  all  right  when  she  knows  who  you  are: — after 
her  mother  has  had  a  talk  with  her,  anyhow.  And  she 
probably  is  all  right,  though  she  may  be  a  little  high  and 
mighty.  They're  all  that,  one  way  and  another.  But, 
with  them,  the  point  is,  it  isn't  a  bluff.  They  really  are 
like  that,  not  putting  it  on.  They  know  they're  solid, 
and  they  don't — give  a  damn,  for  anybody. 

"Take  those  Williamsons.  I  didn't  understand  'em  till 
I  saw  wrhere  they  lived.  They've  got  one  of  the  most 
beautiful  places  I  ever  saw,  up  at  Lake  Forest.  Acres  and 
acres  of  it, — I  don't  know  how  big  it  is.  And  a  house  as 
big  as  a  hotel.  But  it  might  be  a  five-room  cottage  for 
anything  they  care.  They  have  things  as  they  like;  do 
and  dress  as  they  please.  There's  no  one  to  tell  'em  what 
they  shall  do  or  what  they  shan't. 

' '  Well,  we  're  going  to  be  like  that  ourselves.  We  are  now 
only  they  haven't  found  it  out,  altogether.  Some  day, 
we'll  have  a  place  like  Williamson's.  I'm  not  as  rich  as 
he  is  now,  but  I'm  on  the  way  to  be.  I  expect  there 're 
some  of  them  we  '11  find  pretty  dull  and  stuffy,  but  there  're 
others  that  aren't.  I've  found  that  out  already.  On  the 
whole,  once  they  see  we're  inside  the  fence,  they're  a  per 
fectly  friendly  lot.  And  as  good  a  lot  to  settle  down  among 
as  you'll  find  anywhere.  Well,  and  that's  what  we're 
going  to  do,  when  I  've  polished  off  this  flax  business. ' ' 

The  girl  stirred,  impatiently.  She  was  standing  at  the 
window,  looking  out  over  the  lake  where  a  bank  of  heavy 
clouds  was  coming  up  with  a  summer  shower. 

Her  father  rose  and  came  toward  her.  * '  How  does  that 
strike  you?"  he  asked. 

"I  suppose  it's  all  right  to  settle  down  some  time,"  she 


THE  CUB  175 

said.  "Only  that  isn't  what  I'd  hoped  I'd  do  with  you. 
I  thought  maybe  we'd  go  off  somewhere  together,  ex 
ploring  like  you  used  to.  Down  in  South  America.  I 
found  some  letters  once,  that  you  wrote  mother.  Long 
ago,  that  was,  when  I  was  a  little  girl,  but  I've  never  for 
gotten  the  things  you  told  about.  She'd  have  hated  it  all, 
of  course,  but  I'd  love  it.  Riding  over  mountain  passes, 
and  crossing  canyons  on  rope  bridges.  Finding  out 
things;  seeing  things  nobody  else  had  seen.  I  wouldn't 
be  afraid  anywhere,  with  you." 

He  was  silent  at  that,  and,  from  a  glance  she  stole  at 
his  face,  thoughtful.  For  a  breath-arresting  moment,  she 
believed  he  was  entertaining  her  plea  seriously,  but,  at  the 
end  of  it,  he  laughed.  "Out  in  the  middle  of  that,"  he 
said,  with  a  gesture  toward  the  lake,  "with  a  gale  blow 
ing  up,  and  a  rotten  little  leaky  dug-out.  Paddling  for 
your  cheap  life ;  baling.  And  then  a  night  on  shore,  with 
out  a  fire, — nothing  to  make  it  writh  and  not  daring  to  risk 
it  if  you  had."  He  drew  a  deep  breath.  "No,  this  is 
better,  when  you've  got  your  grip  on  it." 

He  turned  to  her.  "We'll  travel,  Trix.  "Well  travel 
a  lot.  Don't  you  worry  about  that.  We'll  go  to  places 
I've  never  seen,  any  more  than  you.  Paris,  and  Madrid, 
and  a  place  up  in  the  mountains,  called  St.  Moritz,  where 
they  have  winter  sports.  We'll  have  a  grand  time,  little 
girl,  as  soon  as  I  dare  take  my  hands  off  this  thing.  For 
a  while,  I  '11  have  to  stick,  tight.  And  that  '11  give  you  time 
to  learn  the  game. 

"Their  game,  d'you  see,  Trix?  Because  they've  got 
one,  and  it  has  to  be  learned.  You'll  be  able  to  play  it, 
when  you  get  the  hang  of  it,  better  than  those  kids  you  saw 
to-day.  They  were  born  with  it  in  their  mouths;  they 
don't  even  know  it's  a  game.  If  they  ever  had  to  learn  a 
different  one,  they'd  be  lost.  But  you  and  I  aren't  like 
that.  We  can  show  'em  a  few  things  they  don't  know,  when 
the  time  comes.  Well,  how  about  it?  Is  that  a  bargain?" 

Anson  had  come  in  to  announce  dinner,  and  was  wait 
ing  respectfully  and  rather  spectrally,  in  the  doorway, 


176         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

for  his  employer  to  finish  speaking.  A  serious  reply 
wasn't  possible,  just  then.  "Oh,  I  suppose  so,"  she  said, 
but  without  any  idea  that,  in  doing  so,  she'd  signed  a 
treaty. 

But  they  hadn't  been  alone  over  the  coffee  cups  two 
minutes  before  her  father,  reverting  to  the  abandoned 
theme-  proceeded  on  the  assumption  that  she  had.  ''I'm 
glad  you  see  it  that  way,  Trix.  It's  no  disgrace  to  be 
ignorant  of  things  you  care  nothing  about, — things  that 
can  neither  please  you  nor  hurt  you.  But  a  thing  that 
can  please  you  or  a  thing  that  can  hurt  you,  you  want  to 
know  all  about.  Take  this  society  chicken-feed.  It  may 
not  seem  worth  while;  it  isn't  until  it  can  get  you  some 
where  you  want  to  go,  or  keep  you  from  getting  there.  If 
it  can,  it's  important.  I've  had  to  study  etiquette,  of  lots 
of  different  kinds.  My  life's  depended  on  it,  more  than 
once,  in  some  of  the  qiieer  places  I  've  been.  On  my  know 
ing  how  to  do  the  right  thing  with  a  mouthful  of  grub,  for 
instance. 

"Of  course,  with  me,  now,  it's  different.  They  know 
I'm  hard-boiled,  and  they  suspect  I'm  dangerous.  That's 
why  they  put  Henry  Craven  into  the  company:  to  watch 
me.  Henry!  He's  all  right,  at  that.  They  know,  some 
of  'em,  that  I  'm  a  better  man  than  they  are,  and  they  like 
me  to  be  what  they  call  'unconventional.'  They  have  to 
like  it,  because  they  know  I  can  get  away  with  it. 

"But  you, — I  want  you  to  learn  their  game.  You  can 
do  it;  I've  seen  that,  already.  But  it'll  mean  watching 
'em,  learning  their  tricks.  I'd  thought  of  sending  you 
for  a  year  to  the  same  school  the  Williamson  girl  goes  to, 
but  it  seems  they  're  full. ' ' 

"It's  lucky  for  them  they  are,"  she  commented.  "I've 
had  all  the  school  I  want." 

"Well,  we  can  consider  that  later,"  he  said.  "But 
for  this  summer,  there  isn't  a  person  who  could  teach  you 
more  or  who  knows  the  game  better  than  Henry's  sister." 
He  added  casually,  "We're  to  go  up  to  the  Williamsons' 
Sunday.  That'll  give  you  a  notion  what  they're  like." 


THE  CUB  177 

The  girl  was  sullenly  aware  that  she  was  being  managed, 
"Miss  Craven's  going  away  next  week,"  she  said. 

"Yes,  so  Henry  told  me."  He  was  apparently  thinking 
it  out  as  he  went  along.  "You  know,  I  believe  if  I  gave 
him  a  tip.  she  'd  be  glad  to  ask  you  to  come  down  and  visit 
her.  She's  got  a  cottage  on  the  seashore,  and  she'll  prob 
ably  have  lots  of  room.  You  see,  111  have  to  be  away  a 
good  deal  myself,  this  summer,  up  in  the  Northwest;  get 
ting  ready  for  our  flax  and  getting  it  in.  How  would  that 
strike  you?" 

Anger  was  the  first  thing  she  felt;  an  outraged  sense 
that  she'd  been  betrayed,  conspired  about,  between  this 
woman  and  her  father.  His  pretended  candor  infuriated 
her.  She  didn't  answer  his  question.  "When  she  spoke, 
after  a  dark  silence,  it  was  to  ask  one  of  her  own. 

"Dad,  are  you  going  to  marry  her?" 

The  shot  told,  surprisingly.  His  head  went  back  under 
the  impact  of  it.  "Marry?  Who?"  he  growled. 

She  took  that  for  rhetoric,  and  waited. 

Presently  his  face  cleared,  into  a  dazzling  grin.  "You 
mean  Margaret  Craven  ?  Is  that  what  you  've  been  worry 
ing  about?" 

Still  watching  him  intently,  she  nodded. 

"Not  till  hell  freezes  over!"  he  assured  her  seriously. 
"Probably  not  then.  But  I'd  like  to  know  what  put  it  in 
your  head." 

Still  she  wasn't  convinced  to  the  point  of  laying  all  her 
cards  on  the  table;  he  wasn't  showing  her  all  his,  she  was 
sure.  "I  didn't  see  why  she  should  be  so  friendly  when 
she  doesn't  like  me  much, — offering  to  help  me  get  my 
clothes,  and  all.  Nor  how  you  could  be  so  sure  she'd  ask 
me  to  visit  her." 

"Well,  it's  simple  enough  when  you  know,"  he  ex 
plained.  "She's  worried  about  Henry.  He  supports  her, 
I  guess.  I  don't  think  they've  got  anything  else.  And 
she's  afraid  I'll  lead  him  astray;  wrants  to  keep  an  eye  on 
him.  So  she  has  to  keep  in  with  me.  And  the 
easiest  way  to  keep  in  with  me  is  by  making  up  to  you. 


178         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

She's  a  clever  woman;  she's  had  to  be,  I  guess.  Besides, 
I  think  she  does  like  you.  She  seemed  to  the  other 
night." 

Beatrice  pushed  back  her  chair  and  rose.  "All  right, 
dad,"  she  said,  "I'll  be  good.  I'll  go  with  her  to  Cape 
Cod,  or  wherever  it  is. ' '  She  paused  to  shoot  an  impudent 
grin  at  him.  "You  see,  she  invited  me  this  afternoon. 
Made  me  promise  to  ask  you  if  I  might  go." 

Then,  laughing  over  his  look  of  blank  discomfiture,  she 
came  round  the  table  and  kissed  him.  But  it  wasn't  the 
sort  of  kiss  she'd  had  waiting  for  him  at  five  o'clock  that 
afternoon. 


CHAPTER  FIVE 

A   DETOUR 


SIMONE  GREVILLE  once  spoke  of  a  group  of  women,  which 
had  included  Violet,  as  perpetual  tasters  of  sensations, 
mostly  mental;  passive  epicures,  waiting  to  be  made  to 
feel.  She  said  she  didn't  know  whether  their  precocity 
had  exhausted  them  before  they  were  ripe  or  whether  they 
had  too  many  ideas  to  leave  room  for  anything  else,  but 
she'd  come  to  believe  that  an  astonishing  proportion  of 
them,  anyhow,  went  through  life  passionless,  frigid,  miss 
ing  the  groat  thing  altogether. 

As  applied  to  Violet,  this  was  pretty  good  diagnosis,  if 
by  Violet  one  means  merely  what  Violet  meant  to  her 
self — the  only  Violet  she  knew  or,  until  her  thirty-ninth 
year,  suspected  the  existence  of. 

When,  on  that  notable  Sunday  morning  in  May,  she'd 
had  her  first  taste  of  Joe  Greer,  she'd  consciously  ad 
mitted  nothing — really  had  been  aware  of  nothing — that 
differentiated  the  experience  from  a  series  of  forays  to  the 
pantry  that  went  back  twenty  years,  to  her  first  experi 
ment  upon  her  boy  cousin,  Henry,  undertaken  during  a 
summer  tour  the  Prince  and  Craven  families  had  made 
among  the  French  chateaux. 

Her  experiment  with  John  "Williamson,  while  it  got 
from  the  fact  of  their  marriage  a  social  significance  that 
was  revolutionary  and,  she  assumed,  permanent,  was  not, 
in  its  psychological  aspect,  very  much  more  important 
than  some  of  the  others.  The  first  weeks  of  marriage  had 

179 


180 

given  her  some  appalling  hours,  of  fright,  of  revulsion  and 
of  a  wildly  incredulous  disappointment.  But  the  subsi 
dence  of  all  this  had  been  an  acquiescence,  a  little  ironic 
but  near  enough  contentment  to  pass  for  it.  So  that  was 
what  it  was  like !  Very  well ;  now  she  knew. 

John  developed,  under  her  spirited  pruning,  into,  really, 
an  old  dear ;  jolly,  just  a  bit  outrageous  now  and  then,  in 
dulgent  always  and  sometimes  sympathetic.  She  had  an 
immense  pride  in  his  weight  and  position  in  the  com 
munity,  and  she  was  deeply  impressed  by  the  discovery, 
once  in  a  while,  of  something  she  couldn't  make  him  do. 
She  was  "terribly  fond  of  him." 

He  was  easily  the  most  important  item  in  her  land 
scape,  but  he'd  long  been,  also,  the  most  familiar  one.  A 
new  item — especially  if  strange,  almost  monstrous,  as  Joe 
Greer  appeared  to  be — was,  naturally,  a  subject  for  in 
vestigation.  John,  thank  goodness,  understood  this  per 
fectly.  It  would  have  been  terribly  silly  of  him,  of  course, 
to  make  a  fuss,  though  there  were  husbands,  Violet  was 
well  aware,  who  did. 

Sophisticated  as  she  believed  herself  to  be  and  as,  in  the 
true  sense  of  the  word,  she  was,  yet,  in  the  valid  expe 
rience  of  life,  she  was  deficient  to  a  degree  that  might  fairly 
be  called  perverse  if  her  case  were  not  so  common  among 
carefully  nurtured  American  women.  What  she  had  told 
Joe,  about  going  through  life  waiting  for  a  door  to  open 
and  coming  to  the  conclusion  that  there  was  no  door  to  the 
thing  she  was  in,  had  been,  so  far  as  she  knew,  merely  a 
part  of  her  technique,  a  useful  item  in  her  standard  reper 
tory,  which  could  be  counted  upon  to  get  almost  any 
man,  even  the  most  reluctant,  started.  She  hadn't  the 
dimmest  notion  how  profoundly  true  it  was. 

She  didn't  feel  at  all  sure  she  liked  the  taste  of  Joe. 
She  found  his  realistic  moments  unpleasantly  acrid;  his 
egotism,  naive;  and  his  prudery, — for  she'd  been  aware  that 
she'd  sometimes  shocked  him, — ridiculous.  She  admitted 
the  attractiveness  of  his  looks,  his  surprisingly  good 
speech,  his  vigor  and  freshness,  and  the  queer  miscellany 


A  DETOUR  181 

that  formed  his  background:  the  jungle,  and  the  musical 
comedy  stage;  that  he  bought  pictures,  and  had  never 
been  to  Europe,  and  knew  Sorolla.  This  was  how  her 
palate  reported  it, — about  as  a  boy's  palate  reports  his 
first  taste  of  strong  drink.  She  didn  't  reckon  on  anything 
in  her,  behind  her  palate  and  capable  of  overruling  its 
report,  being  concerned  in  the  matter.  But  even  on  that 
first  morning,  she'd  been  forced  to  ignore  as  irrelevant 
some  rather  queer  sensations  and  impulses  she'd  had. 

It  annoyed  her  to  learn  that  Joe  was  a  married  man  with 
a  grown  daughter;  she  lost  her  temper  with  John,  who 
told  her  about  it.  "He's  probably  got  five  or  six  wives," 
she  rapped  out.  "One  in  every  port,  like  a  sailor.  I 
suppose  one  of  them  is  trying  to  put  him  in  jail  and  he's 
come  to  you. — And  I'd  bet  you've  said  you'd  help  him 
out!" 

She  would  barely  listen  to  John's  detailed  explanation 
that  Greer's  matrimonial  difficulties  were,  comparatively 
speaking,  respectable,  and  it  did  not  in  the  least  placate 
her  when  she  heard.  ' '  Respectable ! ' '  she  fumed.  ' '  That 's 
the  beastly  second-rate  vulgarity  of  it.  "Why  do  they  think 
they  have  to  marry  those  people?" 

When  she  heard  about  Beatrice,  and  Joe's  wish  to  en 
ter  her  in  a  smart  school,  preferably  Thornycroft,  where 
Dorothy  was,  she  fairly  boiled  over.  What  affair  was  it 
of  his,  or  his  daughter's,  where  Dodo  went  to  school? 
How  did  he  even  know  of  the  school  unless  John  had  been 
babbling  about  it?  But  of  course  John  had  been!  Given 
the  man  all  the  details,  no  doubt,  Miss  Hood's  address, 
himself  as  a  reference,  everything! 

"What's  the  harm  if  I  did?"  he  asked.  "He  couldn't 
get  her  into  that  school  in  a  hundred  years; — not  in  ten, 
anyhow.  And  next  year's  all  that  matters  to  us."  It 
wasn't  this  argument,  however,  that  had  the  effect  of 
pulling  his  wife  up  short;  it  was  his  look  of  curiosity  at 
her.  What  was  there  for  her  to  be  so  disturbed  about? 

She,  herself,  couldn't  understand  why  she'd  been  so 
bitter  about  it  nor  why  she  went  on  thinking  and  feeling 


182         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

that  way.  She  tried  to  make  out  that  she  was  angry  with 
herself  for  being  angry,  but  the  intricacies  of  this  abstrac 
tion  were  a  little  beyond  her.  Preposterously,  what 
warmed  her  into  a  friendlier  feeling  for  the  man  was  the 
outrageous  surmise  that  the  girl  mightn't  be  his  daughter, 
after  all,  but  some  little  fluff  he  was  trying  to  palm  off 
upon  them,  tinder  a  cloak  no  one  would  think  to  look  be 
neath.  She  found  this  notion  rather  entertaining,  though 
she  didn't  take  it  seriously. — Well,  she  didn't  take  him 
seriously,  either! 

She  didn't  pass  it  on  to  John,  for  she  had  a  clear  pre 
monition  that  he  wouldn't  think  it  funny.  She  didn't  sup 
pose  Margaret  Craven  would  think  it  funny,  either,  but 
this  didn't  prevent  her  mentioning  it  to  Margaret,  ex 
perimentally. 

Margaret  took  it  in  the  most  surprising  way;  fairly 
flew  at  her,  over  it. 

"That's  like  you,  Violet,"  she  said,  when,  after  a  tight 
silence,  she  spoke  at  all.  Her  voice  was  brittle  with  anger, 
and  her  eyes  were  dry  with  it.  "How  long  have  you  been 
telling  that  sweet  little  story?" 

The  mere  impact  of  the  charge  took  Violet's  breath. 
"I  haven't  been  telling  it  at  all,"  she  protested.  "I  only 
just  thought  of  it.  It  struck  me  as  amusing,  and  I  said 
it." 

"It  will  be  frightfully  amusing  for  her,  won't  it?" 
There  was  no  quality  of  reflection  in  Margaret's  voice, 
not  even  the  thinnest  veneer  to  give  it  a  surface.  ' '  To  find 
a  story  like  that  going  round !  A  young  girl,  alone  as  she 
is;  even  her  father  a  stranger  to  her." 

"It  isn't  going  around,"  Violet  reiterated.  Then,  with 
a  short  laugh,  as  she  recovered  her  balance :  "  Or  if  it  is, 
it's  not  my  doings.  But  it's  a  natural  enough  thing  for 
anybody  to  think  of,  who  knows  what  he's  like.  As  a 
possibility,  anyhow.  After  all,  how  do  you  know  it  isn't 
true?" 

"I  met  her  last  night,"  Margaret  said.  "We  had  din 
ner  there,  Henry  and  I.  She  happens  to  look  like  him,  in 


A  DETOUE  183 

the  first  place.  He  had  a  photograph  of  her  before  she 
came;  you  could  even  tell  from  that. — So,  if  you  want  a 
story,"  she  went  on,  after  a  breathless  pause,  "you'd  bet 
ter  make  it  that  she's  illegitimate.  It  isn't  likely  that  she 
brought  her  mother's  marriage  certificate  with  her." 

Astonishment  over  the  onslaught  had,  so  far,  kept  Vio 
let  from  feeling  anything  else.  Now,  however,  she  was 
angry,  too.  ''Do  you  mind  telling  me,"  she  asked, 
"what's  Driven  you  the  extraordinary  idea  that  I  want  a 
story!  What  you  think  I've  got  to  do  with  it,  from  first 
to  last?" 

Margaret  laughed.  "Oh,  if  you've — taken  him  on, 
yourself,  of  course  a  grown  daughter  turning  up  is  a 
nuisance. ' ' 

"I  see,"  said  Violet  reflectively.  And  then,  with  a 
laugh,  as  she  rose  to  get  a  cigarette,  "Well,  I  guess  we've 
pretty  well  covered  that." 

Margaret  matched  her  tone.  "I  should  think  we  had! 
I  feel  as  if  I'd  been  in  the  movies.  My  cook  left  this 
morning;  I  suppose  that's  what  started  it.  Have  you 
heard  that  Paula  Wollaston  is  going  to  sing  at  Ravinia, 
after  all?  She's  left  John  down  in  North  Carolina  and 
come  back  for  rehearsals.  Going  to  open  the  season  in 
Tosca,  Wallace  Hood  says." 

Violet  caught  the  ball  expertly,  and  tossed  it  back. 
' '  Oh,  I  know  the  man  who  will  be  singing  with  her.  Four- 
nier  his  name  is.  Dodo  and  I  met  him  in  New  York. 
Frightfully  distinguished-looking, — and  attractive. ' ' 

They  went  on  and  ate  their  prearranged  lunch  together 
as  if  nothing  had  happened.  But  just  before  they  parted, 
Margaret  went  back,  firmly  and  with  a  hand  as  steady  as 
a  surgeon's,  to  the  focus  of  their  quarrel. 

' '  She 's  really  rather  nice,  Joe  Greer  's  daughter.  Not 
quite  so  much  a  cat  in  a  strange  garret  as  he  was  afraid 
she  was  going  to  be.  He  wants  me  to  look -after  her  a  little, 
and  I'm  glad  to  do  it.  Mind  if  I  ask  Dodo  to  lunch  with 
her  some  day?" 

To  Violet,  the  purport  of  this  was  as  plain  as  it  was  as- 


184         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

tonishing.  If  Margaret  had  said,  in  so  many  words,  "I 
think  of  marrying  this  man.  I've  made  a  start  toward 
getting  him.  So,  if  you  want  to  play  fair,  you'll  let  him 
alone," — she  couldn't  have  made  it  clearer.  As  a  decent, 
married  middle-aged  member  of  society,  Violet  had  to 
acknowledge  the  reasonableness  of  this  request.  In  some 
moods,  she  even  accorded  a  tentative  half-approval  of  the 
plan.  If  Joe  was  in  the  way  to  make  a  serious  fortune 
out  of  this  linen  process  that  looked  so  good  to  John,  he'd 
be  a  pretty  good  matrimonial  risk, — as  good  as  Margaret 
would  ever  get  a  chance  to  take. 

Violet  wanted  her  married.  She  was  still  a  social  as 
set,  for  a  difficult  dinner  or  a  week-end  party;  but  ten 
years  from  now, — a  little  tighter  drawn,  her  wit  oftener 
mordant  than  refreshingly  acidulous,  one  wouldn't  know 
what  to  do  with  her.  In  such  a  marriage  Mar 
garet,  fastidious  as  she  was,  would,  of  course, 
loathe  the  man  himself.  Her  first  unguarded 
comments  upon  him  had  really  been  funny.  It 
wasn't  likely  the  instinct  of  a  lifetime  could  have  changed 
enough  in  two  or  three  months  to  make  him  seem,  per 
sonally,  desirable.  It  was  that  prospective  fortune  Mar 
garet  was  banking  on,  a  line  of  reasoning  which  justified 
Violet,  the  first  chance  she  got,  in  putting  the  project  be 
fore  John. 

Her  opening  startled  him,  for  she  began  by  asking  if 
the  linen  business  was  really  a  frightfully  good  thing,  and 
he  jumped  to  the  surmise  that  Joe  was  trying  to  unload  his 
stock  on  some  of  her  friends.  It  took  a  minute  or  two  to 
get  him  back  on  the  rails. 

"It's  him  I  want  to  know  about,"  she  insisted. 
"Whether  he's  going  to  get  frightfully  rich  out  of  it,  or 
not.  Because  Margaret  means  to  marry  him." 

Again  it  took  her  a  few  minutes  to  get  him  calmed  to 
the  listening  point. 

Margaret  wasn't  eloping  with  him  this  afternoon;  she 
wasn't  even  engaged  to  him.  "I  didn't  say  she  was  go 
ing  to  marry  him ;  I  said  she  meant  to,  when  the  time  came. 


A  DETOUR  185 

It's  a  plan  of  hers,  that's  all.  Only  I  thought  you  might 
as  well  know." 

Let  down,  he  swung  the  other  way  and  treated  the  idea 
jocularly,  as  another  of  her  numerous  mare 's  nests.  ' '  How 
did  you  find  out  about  it?  Did  she  tell  you  herself?" 

" Practically,"  Violet  asserted,  and  went  on  with  con 
firmatory  details.  Margaret  had  been  seeing  quite  a  lot 
of  him;  she'd  known  about  his  daughter  before  any  of 
the  rest  of  them, — before  the  girl  came  on  at  all ;  had  seen 
a  photograph  of  her;  they'd  dined  there  again  last  night, 
she  and  Henry,  to  meet  her.  "She  says  the  girl's  rather 
nice  and  she's  going  to  take  her  up.  She's  asking  Dodo 
for  a  lunch  for  her,  next  week.  Doesn't  that  look  as  if 
she  meant  something?  And  if  he's  going  to  be  really 
rich, ' '  Violet  watched  her  husband  intently  as  she  ventured 
this,  "it  might  not  be  such  a  bad  thing  for  her." 

She  could  see  that  he  was  upset  by  the  idea,  though  he 
went  on  proclaiming  his  total  disbelief  in  it.  A  fine 
grained  girl  like  Margaret  couldn't  be  considering  Joe 
Greer  as  a  husband ;  a  man  of  rough  manners,  no  morals,  a 
brutal  temper,  not  even  divorced  yet,  and  fifty  years  old. 
And,  on  top  of  it  all,  a  mere  adventurer,  anyhow. 

"His  age  wouldn 't  bother  anybody,"  she  remarked 
dryly.  "And  he  won't  go  on  being  an  adventurer,  if  this 
linen  business  makes  him  rich — really  rich,  I  mean." 

"Well,  if  that's  what  she's  counting  on,"  he  grumbled, 
"she'll  wait  a  while.  If  she  takes  my  advice,  she  will." 

"Why?"  Violet  demanded.  "Don't  you  think  it's  a 
good  thing?" 

"Of  course  I  do.  Wouldn't  have  put  money  into  it  if 
I  didn't.  But  that  doesn't  mean  necessarily  that  he'll  get 
rich  over  it." 

He  went  on,  in  response  to  a  rather  startled  look  she 
shot  him,  to  explain.  He  didn't  mean  anything  sinister 
by  that.  Only,  with  a  fellow  like  Greer,  you  never  could 
tell.  He  might  fly  off  the  handle  any  time.  "He  isn't 
the  sort  that  naturally  gets  rich.  Sooner  or  later,  he's 
likely  to  bite  off  more  than  he  can  chew.  Of  course,  if 


186        JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

she  did  marry  him  ..."  He  relapsed  into  an  abstracted 
silence  and  took  two  or  three  drafts  on  his  cigar.  "She 
won't,  though,  I  don't  believe,"  he  concluded. 

He  hadn't  taken  the  idea  as  hard  as  he  might  have  been 
expected  to,  for  the  amount  he'd  done  for  Margaret,  all 
these  years,  had  made  him  a  bit  romantic  about  her,  and 
he  liked  having  her  around,  just  as  she  was:  at  home  in 
his  house,  on  call.  He  might  have  vetoed  the  thing  sum 
marily,  and  ordered  it  broken  up;  given  his  wife  carte 
blanche  to  see  that  it  went  no  further.  Distinctly,  he 
hadn't  done  that.  Margaret  had  better  go  slow, — this  was 
all  his  advice  came  to ;  and  she  'd  have  to  do  that,  anyhow. 
Even  if  the  man  were  divorced  to-day,  she  couldn't  marry 
him  legally,  here  in  Illinois,  for  another  year.  And  any 
number  of  things  could  happen  in  that  time.  The  thing 
he'd  said  that  had  given  Violet  most  food  for  thought  was 
that  broken  sentence,  "Of  course,  if  he  married  Mar 
garet  .  .  ."  Had  he  meant  that  this  would  bring  Joe, 
somehow,  within  the  pale?  Afford  him  the  protection  of 
another  code,  so  that  he  'd  be  allowed  to  get  rich,  after  all  ? 

Anyhow,  the  thing  for  Violet  to  do — for  the  next  few 
months — was  to  let  Joe  Greer  alone.  If  she  as  much  as 
looked  at  him,  let  alone  lifted  a  finger,  Margaret  would 
attribute  the  probable  failure  of  her  project  (for  what 
serious  attraction  could  a  cold  finicky  person  like  Mar 
garet  effectively  exert  upon  this  genial  freebooter?)  to 
her,  and,  judging  by  the  latest  sample  of  her  conduct,  act 
most  unreasonably  about  it.  Luckily,  it  mattered  very 
little  to  Violet  herself;  she'd  have  nothing  to  do  with 
Joe — for  the  present,  anyhow. 

She  kept  this  resolution  scrupulously,  for  a  little  less 
than  a  week;  then,  on  the  afternoon  of  Margaret's  lunch 
for  Beatrice,  as  a  result  of  a  chance  encounter  with  him, 
she  broke  it  rather  badly.  She'd  motored  in  with  Dorothy, 
having  three  or  four  things  she  wanted  to  do  in  town — 
the  most  important  of  these  being  a  call  on  Eileen  Corbett, 
Gregory's  wife,  who  was  at  the  Presbyterian  Hospital 
having  had  her  appendix  out.  It  was  around  five  o'clock 


A  DETOUR  187 

•when  she  left  the  hospital.  She  hadn't  gone  more  than  a 
block  or  two,  when  her  chauffeur  ran  over  a  jagged  frag 
ment  of  a  broken  milk  bottle  and  blew  a  tire.  He  trundled 
over  to  the  curb,  stopped  behind  a  car  that  was  parked 
there — it  had,  she  thought  at  the  time,  a  faintly  familiar 
look, — and  went  to  work,  in  the  disgustingly  deliberate 
manner  characteristic  of  chauffeurs,  putting  on  a  spare. 

It  was  the  hottest  part  of  what  had  turned  out  to  be  a 
remorselessly  hot  day,  and  this  particular  spot  was,  she 
was  sure,  the  hottest  in  Chicago.  The  prospect  of  a 
fifteen  or  twenty  minutes'  wait  was  irksome.  But,  be 
fore  the  first  of  them  had  passed,  Joe  appeared,  amazingly, 
descending  in  the  freight  elevator  from  the  very  build 
ing  opposite  which  they'd  stopped. 

"What  on  earth  are  you  doing  out  here?"  she  cried  at 
sight  of  him.  She  cared  nothing  about  an  answer;  the 
question  was  galvanic.  All  she  was  aware  of  was  a  tin 
gling  sensation  from  the  brilliant  look  he  gave  her  and  the 
feel  of  the  hand  which  met  the  one  she'd  stretched  out  to 
him. 

But  his  answer  was  not  perfunctory.  "This  is  the  last 
place  I'd  expect  you  to  come  to,"  he  said.  "Even  your 
husband's  never  paid  us  a  visit  here."  Then,  perceiving 
the  chauffeur's  occupation  and,  in  the  same  instant,  in 
terpreting  her  puzzled  frown,  he  explained,  "Why,  this  is 
our  laboratory.  I  thought,  for  a  minute,  you'd  come  out 
to  see  what  our  linen  process  was  like." 

"I  didn't  even  know  you  had  a  laboratory,"  she  said. 
"What  is  it  like?  A  laboratory  always  sounds  exciting." 

"This  one  isn't,"  he  told  her  derisively. 

"It's  so  beastly  hot  right  here,"  she  began,  "that 
almost  anything  ..." 

"It's  hotter  up  there,"  he  broke  in.  "And  it  stinks  to 
heaven.  I  wish  there  were  some  place —  The  roar  of  a 
passing  elevated  train  checked  his  speech,  but  he  went  on 
staring  at  her  thoughtfully  until  it  passed.  " — I  wish 
there  were  some  cool  quiet  place  that  I  could  take  you  to, 
and  make  you  comfortable,  and  give  you  a  drink — or  a 


188         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

eup  of  tea.  But  if  there's  such  a  place  within  a  mile  of 
here,  I  don't  know  it." 

She  agreed  with  him  about  the  frightfulness  of  the  "West 
Side  and  then  told  him  idly  that  her  father-in-law's  old 
house,  where  John  had  lived  until  they  married,  was  just 
round  the  corner.  She  was  still  in  the  possession  of  his 
look,  and  feeling  half  resentful  and  half  amused  over  the 
way  it  had  appropriated  her.  At  this,  however,  he  laughed 
outright  and  his  gaze  abandoned  her. 

"The  human  animal  can  change  a  lot  in  one  generation, 
'can't  it?"  he  observed.  "They  tell  a  wonderful  lot  of 
stories  about  old  Nick.  It's  queer  to  think  you  must  have 
known  him." 

This  irreverence  gave  her,  of  course,  an  excellent  chance 
to  snub  him,  put  him  in  his  place,  and  begin  keeping,  once 
more,  her  forgotten  resolution.  But  instead  of  trying  any 
thing  like  this,  she  said,  "Know  him!  I  should  think  I 
did;"  then  laughed,  and  added,  "You'd  have  got  on  with 
him." 

"I  expect  he  was  more  my  kind  than  your  husband  is," 
'Joe  commented  soberly.  But  the  next  moment  he  grinned 
straight  into  her  face  and  said,  "I'll  bet  you  got  on  with 
him  yourself,  like  a  house  afire." 

He  gave  her  no  chance  to  deal  with  this,  for  by  now 
he  'd  got  an  idea.  There  was  no  need  of  her  sitting  here, 
sweltering.  He  could  take  her  in  his  car  wherever  she  had 
been  going  and  hers  could  follow  and  pick  her  up  as  soon 
as  it  was  in  running  order. 

"Why,  I've  nowhere  to  go,"  she  told  him,  with  a  faint 
smile,  "except  Lake  Forest." 

He  took  her  up.  "I've  plenty  of  time  and  gas.  Come 
along!" 

But  this  was  rather  farther  than  she  cared  to  go.  "I'll 
tell  you  what  you  can  do  though,  if  you've  really  time  to 
rescue  me;  you  can  take  me  to  our  town  house.  There's 
no  one  there  but  the  care-takers,  but  a  closed-up  house  is 
always  the  coolest  place  there  is." 

She  couldn't  tell  whether  this  amendment  relieved  or 


A  DETOUK  189 

disappointed  him.  He  merely  nodded,  and  held  the  door 
while  she  instructed  her  chauffeur.  "Come  to  Astor 
Street  for  me,  Jeffrey,"  she  said.  "But  you'd  better  get 
a  new  spare  tire,  first."  Joe  showed  no  sign  of  noting, 
either,  that  this  order  of  hers  substantially  protracted  the 
time  she'd  have  to  wait.  It  really  meant  nothing  to  him, 
of  course,  because  she  hadn't  the  least  idea  of  asking  him 
to  wait  with  her. 

He  kept  her  wondering  about  him  all  the  way  home.  She 
wondered  why  he  didn  't  follow  the  obvious  boulevard  route 
instead  of  threading  his  way  among  the  West  Side  streets 
and  then  whipping  her  across  West  Chicago  Avenue.  Did 
he  feel  there  was  something  necessarily  clandestine  about 
taking  another  man's  wife  for  a  ride  in  his  car?  Or  had 
he  the  idea  of  showing  her  how  the  other  half — that  once 
had  been  his — lived?  He  showed  an  unexpected,  and 
likable,  friendliness  toward  the  people,  especially  the 
children,  who  swarmed  these  streets.  He  shouted  jokes  at 
the  ball  players  whose  games  their  passage  interrupted  and 
waved  a  brotherly  hand  to  youngsters  who  gazed,  awe- 
entranced,  at  the  glories  of  his  car.  He  drove  fast  but 
with  unexpected  care.  And  he  made  no  effort  to  talk  to 
her.  As  they  turned  into  Chicago  Avenue,  he  nodded  to 
ward  a  plain  brick  building  and  told  her  it  was  another 
laboratory,  Hugh  Corbett's.  "There's  one  of  your  bunch. 
I'd  like  really  to  know,"  he  said;  and  when  she  asked,  with. 
a  laugh,  "The  only  one?"  he  let  the  question  go  with  no 
more  answer  than  an  unsmiling  look. 

It  had  a  queer  effect  upon  her,  making  suddenly  pal 
pable  a  vague  sense  she'd  had  ever  since  she  sat  down 
beside  him  in  the  car,  of  something  unexplored  she  had  ia 
common  with  him.  That  look  was  his  acknowledgment  of 
it.  "You  won't  tell,  and  I  won't  ask,  but  we  understand 
each  other."  That's  what  it  said. 

She  had  to  direct  him  to  her  house,  and  something  about 
his  smile,  when  she  commented  on  the  oddity  of  his  not 
knowing  where  she  lived,  decided  her  to  invite  him  ia. 
There  was  a  dash  of  mischief  about  it,  too,  for  she  saw  he 


190         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

didn  't  know  how  much  or  how  little  she  meant  by  it.  "  Oh, 
come  in, ' '  she  insisted.  ' '  You  deserve  a  chance  to  get  cool 
after  rescuing  me  like  that;  and  it's  only  for  a  few  min 
utes."  But  not  even  the  drink  she  provided  put  him  at 
ease. 

Experimentally,  with  the  rewarded  purpose  of  surpris 
ing  him,  she  spoke  of  his  daughter,  whom  he,  apparently, 
had  no  intention  of  mentioning.  "Margaret's  been  tell 
ing  me  how  nice  she  is. — Why  have  you  kept  her  dark?" 
But  the  surprise  proved  a  boomerang.  After  his  first 
start,  he  took  time  to  frame  a  deliberate  answer  which  left 
her  gasping. 

"It  wasn't  because  I'm  ashamed  of  her.  It  was  be 
cause  I  don't  know  where  you  and  I  stand.  I  don't  care 
•what  you  take  me  for,  a  pirate  or  a  cannibal — anything 
you  like."  There  was  nothing  humorous  about  this;  his 
tone  was  almost  menacing.  "But  she's  no — cannibal 
princess !  And  if  I  can  help  it,  she  isn't  going  to  be  taken 
that  way." 

Violet  knew  exactly  the  manner  she  wanted  to  meet 
this  onslaught,  but  she  found  herself  unable  to  command 
it,  She  was  trembling;  she  felt  the  blood  burning  in  her 
face.  She  thought  Margaret  must  have  betrayed  her.  "I 
don't  know,"  she  faltered^  "what  any  one  may  have  told 
you  I  've  said  ..." 

"No  one  has  told  me  anything,"  he  broke  in.  "Who 
would?  Who  knew? — Except  the  Cravens."  He  stopped 
for  a  thoughtful  smile.  "No,  Margaret  hasn't  said  any 
thing,  ' '  he  went  on.  ' '  It  was  just  the  smell  in  the  air. ' ' 

She  was,  she  assured  herself,  furious  with  him  for  hav 
ing  shaken  her  like  that.  It  was  what  one  deservedly  got 
for  playing  with  outsiders.  She'd  turn  him  out — sum 
marily  make  an  end  of  him — if  it  weren't  that  Jeffrey's 
arrival  with  the  car — any  minute,  now — would  save  her 
the  trouble.  But,  all  the  while,  she  was  in  the  grip  of  a 
sort  of  nightmare  obsession  that,  if  he  wanted  to,  now, 
he'd  come  over  to  her  and  take  her  in  his  arms  and  she 
wouldn't  even  try  to  hold  him  off.  And  that  he  knew  she 
•wouldn't. 


A  DETOUR  191] 

Instead  of  this  fantastic  happening,  he  sat  back  more  at 
his  ease  than  he'd  been  before,  and  reflectively  went  on 
talking.  He  began  with  a  disarming  apology  for  having 
startled  her.  He'd  spoken  out  more  plainly  than  she  was 
used  to,  but  he  hadn't  done  it  wantonly.  There  was  some 
thing  he  wanted  her  to  understand. 

' '  I  've  always  been  a  law  unto  myself, ' '  he  said.  ' '  That 's 
the  only  kind  of  a  person  I  could  be.  If  you're  like  that, 
you  've  got  to  make  up  your  mind  not  to  care  a  damn  what 
any  one  else  thinks  of  you  or  of  the  things  you  do.  It's 
the  only  possible  line  to  take,  if  you  stop  to  think.  But 
that  doesn  't  mean  that  I  've  been  satisfied  with  everything 
I've  done.  I've  done  some  things  that  were  pretty  low 
down.  I've  treated  some  people  that  way.  One  of  them 
was  my  wife.  I  deserted  her  before  Beatrice  was  born. 
Before  I  knew  she  was  going  to  be  born.  She  was  almost 
a  year  old  before  I  knew  I  had  a  daughter. — Well,  I  can't 
make  anything  up  to  my  wife.  She  hates  me ;  always  did. 
I  'm  the  last  sort  of  man  in  the  world  for  her  to  have  mar 
ried.  You  must  have  seen  things  happen  like  that  your 
self.  But  I  can  make  it  up  to  the  girl,  and  I'm  going  to 
do  it.  She  hasn't  had  much  of  a  life  up  to  now,  but  now 
it's  going  to  begin.  The  best  there  is — of  everything.  It 
may  not  be  all  smooth  sailing,  at  first.  I  thought  I'd  put 
her  in  the  same  school  your  daughter  goes  to,  but  they've 
written  to  say  they're  full." 

His  skeptical  manner  gave  her  a  clue.  "I'm  sure  that's 
true,"  she  said.  "We  had  to  enter  Dorothy  at  Thorny- 
croft  years  before  she  was  ready  to  go.  Everybody  does. — 
I  suppose  that's  why  you  thought  you  didn't  know  where 
you — stood,  as  you  said,  with  me. 

"The  trouble  with  you  is,"  she  went  on  after  a  silence, 
"that  you  think  you're  still  in  the  jungle." 

"And  are  you  telling  me  I'm  not?"  he  asked.  "Shall 
I  begin  trusting  everybody?" 

A  disconcerting  memory  flashed  into  her  mind  of  the 
way  John  had  said  that  the  great  possibilities  of  the  linen 
business  didn't  mean,  necessarily,  that  Joe  was  going  to 


192         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

be  rich.  She  laughed.  "Trust  your  friends,  anyhow," 
she  said,  adding,  after  another  pause,  "And  don't  let 
Margaret  Craven  monopolize  that  nice  daughter  of  yours. 
Bring  her  up  to  see  us  Sunday  morning.  Everybody 
comes,  more  or  less,  to  swim  and  play  tennis  and  so  on, 
and  stays  to  lunch." 

He  showed  himself  frankly  pleased  by  the  invitation, 
but,  perversely,  this  was  not  the  note  she  wanted  to  part 
with  him  upon.  She  added  a  final  touch.  "I'll  see  that 
Margaret's  there — for  you,"  she  said. 

He  made,  in  words,  no  reply  to  this,  but  his  look  took 
hold  of  her  again  and  for  a  good  long  moment  held  her 
tight,  so  that,  once  more,  she  felt  the  blood  burn  in  her 
face.  She'd  been  kissed  with  a  good  deal  less  intimacy 
than  that  came  to.  He  didn't  offer  even  the  formal  con 
tact  of  a  hand-shake;  merely  nodded  at  her  and  went 
away,  wearing  his  most  brilliant  grin. 

He  left  her  ruffled,  breathless,  and  uncertain  whether 
she  was  angry  or  elated.  She  tried  to  establish  the  former 
by  fastening  upon  an  object,  but  there  was  no  one,  really, 
but  herself  to  be  angry  with — unless  one  put  the  blame  on 
Margaret  for  entertaining  foolish  hopes  and  trying  to 
maintain  preposterous  prohibitions.  It  was  idiotic  to  take 
the  affair  as  seriously  as  that.  She  couldn't  see  that  she 
would  hurt  Margaret's  chances  a  bit  by  taking  Joe  in  and 
being  decently  friendly  with  him.  "Wasn't  Margaret's 
only  possible  attraction  for  him  based  on  the  class  she  be 
longed  to  ?  If  he  liked  them  all,  learned  that  conventional 
behavior  had  its — mitigations,  wouldn't  he  be  a  lot  more 
likely  to  ask  Margaret  to,  as  it  were,  make  an  honest  man 
of  him? 

His  daughter  was  a  tiresome  complication,  of  course,  but 
it  had  been  rather  thrilling,  the  way  he  'd  talked  about  her, 
and  perhaps  Margaret  had  been  truthful  in  saying  she 
wasn't  so  bad. 

The  only  thing  to  be  watchful  of  was  the  possibility  of 
her  having  a  bad  influence  on  Dorothy.  (Violet  had  can- 
vulsive  moments  of  taking  the  responsibilities  of  mother- 


A  DETOUR  193 

hood  very  seriously  indeed.)  But  Dorothy's  report  of 
the  luncheon  put  that  misgiving  away.  Violet  had  to  ask 
for  it,  for  Dodo,  after  two  days  on  the  Wollaston  farm 
with  Sylvia,  had  forgotten  all  about  the  girl. 

' '  Oh,  at  Margaret 's  lunch !  Why,  she 's  all  right. ' '  This 
was  said  through  a  yawn.  "She  knows  all  about  finger- 
bowls  and  things.  Dressed  to  kill,  rather.  I  think  she 
meant  us  to  understand  from  something  she  said  while 
Margaret  was  out  of  the  room,  that  she  means  to  vamp 
Henry. — Shouldn't  wonder  if  she  could,  too." 

"Is  she — all  right,  do  you  think?"  Violet  put  the 
question  dubiously,  not  quite  sure  what  the  girl  would 
think  she  meant  by  it,  nor,  to  tell  the  truth,  exactly  what 
she  did  mean.  But  the  confidential  atmosphere  in  which 
the  words  were  enveloped  was  what  mattered. 

"Oh,  she  isn't — poisonous,  if  that's  what  you  mean,''* 
the  child  assured  her.  "She's  all — right;  only  not  much. 
It's  sort  of  too  bad,  too,  because  I  think  her  father  must 
be  rather  a  lark." 

"Well,  it's  a  case  of  love  me,  love  my  dog,"  Violet  re 
marked.  "If  you  want  to  get  on  with  him,  don't  try  to 
treat  her  like  a  cannibal  princess,  because  he  won't  have 
it. — They're  coming  up,  Sunday,"  she  added. 

"If  she  was  anywhere  near  as  amusing  as  a  cannibal 
princess,  it  would  be  easier,"  said  Dodo  dispassionately, 
"but  I'll  do  my  best,  mother." 

2 

Sunday  at  the  Williamsons'  went  off,  Joe  decided,  very 
well.  (Margaret,  it  may  be  noted,  was  not  there,  "for 
him.")  There  was  nothing,  even  in  the  smell  of  the  air, 
to  suggest  that  Beatrice  was  being  taken  as  a  cannibal 
princess.  She  seemed,  whenever  his  eyes  fell  upon  her,  to 
be  having  not  only  a  jolly  time  but  to  be  making,  es 
pecially  with  the  boys,  a  real  success.  She  was  in  the 
pool,  most  of  the  time  before  lunch,  getting  taught,  en 
thusiastically,  to  swim. 

After  lunch,  he  lost  sight  of  her  for  a  while,  but  she 


194         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

turned  up,  just  as  he  was  beginning  to  wonder  about  her, 
in  the  company  of  a  white-flanneled  youngster  with  whom 
she  seemed  on  very  good  terms.  He  had  dark  red  curly 
hair;  his  features,  without  being  insignificant,  were  small 
and  fine,  so  that  he'd  have  made  an  unusually  pretty  girl, 
though  his  build  was  sturdy  enough.  He  walked  with  a 
•well-marked  limp. 

Joe  heard  him  call  her  Trixie,  and  took  his  first  oppor 
tunity  to  ask,  not  of  the  girl  herself,  who  he  was.  His  in 
formant  was  Mrs.  Hugh  Corbett. 

"He's  Lansing  Ware,"  she  told  him,  but  stopped  at 
that,  short  of  giving  him  any  further  details; 

Joe  asked  if  he  'd  been  wounded  in  the  war,  and  noted  a 
momentary  hesitation  about  her  reply. 

' '  He  was  in  the  Aviation, ' '  she  said.  ' '  He  got  that  stiff 
ankle  in  an  accident  at  his  training  camp,  quite  early.  I 
don't  know  exactly  what  it  was."  She  added  at  once, 
"I'll  always  be  grateful  to  his  sister,  Muriel.  She  gave 
me  a  chance  to  be  a  bridesmaid  at  Anne  Corbett 's  wed 
ding  by  getting  a  stye  just  before  the  day  of  the  cere 
mony." 

Joe  asked  no  more  questions  about  his  daughter's  cav 
alier.  The  boy  was  placed,  implicitly,  as  one  of  the  "reg 
ular"  people  he  wanted  her  to  know,  and  that  "Trixie," 
along  with  his  rather  intimate  way  with  her,  was  as  far 
as  he  could  see,  merely  part  and  parcel  of  the  manners 
current  here. 

Driving  home  with  her,  that  afternoon,  after  a  few 
miles  of  thoughtful  silence,  he  told  her  she  needn't,  unless 
she  liked,  go  to  Cape  Cod  with  Margaret — oh,  perhaps  for 
a  week  or  two  later.  Joe  was  vaguely  aware  that  it  had 
been  in  the  course  of  his  one  talk  with  Violet  that  he'd 
changed  his  plans  for  his  daughter's  summer.  Yet  he'd 
hardly  have  said  then  that  Violet  was  responsible  for  the 
change,  let  alone  that  she'd  suggested  it. 

The  visit  had  not  produced  quite  the  sort  of  step  in  his 
acquaintance  with  Violet  that  he'd  looked  forward  to. 
She  hadn  't  carried  him  off  for  a  walk,  nor  withdrawn  with 


A  DETOUR  195 

him  to  the  shade  of  that  grove  of  oaks  to  look  down  upon 
the  show  she  'd  once  promised  him.  She  'd  been,  decidedly, 
one  of  the  performers  in  it  all  the  while.  Her  duties  as 
hostess  had  been  made  heavier,  too,  by  the  presence,  among 
the  guests,  of  three  or  four  opera  singers  just  arrived  for 
the  Ravinia  season,  one  of  them  especially — a  Frenchman 
named  Fournier  who  spoke  no  English  and  needed  care 
ful  management  to  keep  him  from  getting  stranded.  But 
Joe  hadn't  felt  slighted.  Even  her  unconcern  had  sug 
gested  a  certain  friendliness,  and,  on  the  terrace  after 
lunch,  she'd  openly  made  an  opportunity  for  a  talk  with 
him. 

His  first  sight  of  her  that  morning  had  affected  him 
powerfully,  too,  renewing  the  bewildered  incredulity,  the 
discoverer's  excitement  and  the  strong  sensuous  attraction 
that  he'd  felt  the  morning  she  appeared  at  the  traps. 
She  was  in  the  pool,  when  he  and  Beatrice  arrived,  among 
the  earliest  of  the  day's  visitors,  and  it  was  literally  true 
that,  for  a  moment,  after  she'd  climbed  the  ladder  at  the 
deep  end  and  come  to  greet  them,  he  didn't  know  her. 
The  tight  blue  rubber  bathing-cap  which  confined  her 
hair,  and  the  clinging  wet  sheen  of  the  swimming  suit,  no 
more  ample  than  one  her  daughter  would  have  worn, 
triumphantly  challenged  youth  itself.  She'd  smiled  at 
his  stare,  and  laughed  at  his  explanation  of  it.  Dorothy, 
who  had  escorted  them  down  from  the  house,  said  dispas 
sionately  to  Beatrice,  "You  see  how  hopeless  it  is.  Now 
do  you  wonder  I  don't  call  her  mother?"  Joe  did  not,  at 
all  events.  She  seemed,  standing  there — erect,  unsmiling, 
a  little  detached,  the  older  of  the  two. 

His  vision  of  Violet, — revealed,  Diana-like,  finer  and 
whiter  and  silkier  than  his  imagination  would  have  dared 
pretend,  persisted.  It  was  not  far  in  the  background  of 
his  thoughts,  while  they  talked  on  the  terrace.  Yet  this 
sensuous  appeal  was  not  the  only  one,  nor  perhaps,  the 
strongest,  she'd  made  to  him.  He'd  enjoyed  the  friendly 
good-humor  of  her  ready  laugh ;  her  sallies  of  what  might 
pass,  unscrutinized,  for  wit;  her  light-handed  way  of  re- 


196         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

disposing  people  when  the  old  groupings  were  growing  a 
little  stale. — She  took  it  easier  than  Margaret,  and  there 
fore  did  it  better. 

He  was  pleasantly  stirred  by  her  relation  with  her  daugh 
ter, — the  spectacle  they  sometimes  presented  of  a  com 
plete  reversal  of  roles.  The  pair  understood  each  other, 
down  to  the  ground,  and  were,  no  doubt,  deeply  fond  of 
each  other,  though  they  never  expressed  that  fact  in  any 
of  the  orthodox  ways.  He  wondered  how  it  would  seem 
to  have  Beatrice  calling  him  Joe,  but  decided  he  wouldn't 
like  it.  There  were  scores  of  girls  who'd  done  that,  at 
one  time  or  another,  but  she  was  the  only  one  who  called 
him  dad.  But,  as  between  Violet  and  Dorothy,  where  none 
of  these  echoes  intruded,  it  bespoke  a  charming  confi 
dence  which  couldn't  have  been  built  up  in  the  absence  of 
a  sympathetic  understanding  on  the  part  of  the  mother. 

Violet  had  given  him,  too,  one  evidence  of  friendly  con 
cern  that  touched  him.  She'd  remembered  the  wish  he'd 
expressed  to  meet  Hugh  Corbett,  and  had  made,  it  seemed, 
a  special  effort  to  secure  Hugh  and  his  wife  to-day  for  the 
purpose  of  bringing  this  meeting  about.  (Joe  had  had  a 
wonderful  talk  with  Hugh,  having  found  in  him  one  whose 
imagination  could  do  justice  to  cellulose  fiber, — one  to 
whom  it  mightn't  just  as  well  have  been  putty,  or  prunes.) 

The  sum  of  all  this  was  that,  when  Violet  told  him  to 
pull  that  chair  a  little  farther  around  the  corner  into  a 
position  more  easily  overlooked,  and  then  sat  down  in  it 
with  the  expressed  hope  that  they  might  have  a  few  min 
utes  to  themselves,  his  jungle  wariness  was  in  abeyance. 
She  spoke  at  once  about  Beatrice,  in  terms,  of  course,  of 
praise.  Fascinating,  she  called  her,  and  a  dear.  Delight 
ful  to  look  at,  too,  clothes  and  all,  and  with  a  freshness 
about  her  most  engaging.  To  the  father's  charmed  ear 
there  was  nothing  suggestive  of  the  cannibal  princess  in 
any  of  this.  He  let  himself  begin  to  talk,  more  freely 
than  he'd  ever  supposed  he  could  talk  with  a  woman  who 
attracted  him  as  this  one  did,  about  the  girl,  his  hopes  for 
her,  the  problems  she  presented.  And  in  this  connection, 


A  DETOUR  197 

he  told  her  how  Margaret  figured  in  the  design,  and  about 
the  contemplated  summer  on  Cape  Cod. 

All  he  perceived,  at  first,  was  that  Violet  saw  some  aspect 
of  this  plan  that  hadn't  occurred  to  him — and  that  she 
was  quietly  finding  a  source  of  amusement  in  it.  Yet  it 
wasn't  as  if  she  were  laughing  at  him.  There  was  a  gleam 
of  mischief  about  her  almost  suppressed  smile  which  hinted 
that  she  'd  like  to  share  the  joke  with  him,  if  she  dared. 

He  didn't  ask  her  to  tell  him  what  the  joke  was.  His 
returning  wariness  warned  him,  indeed,  not  to  let  her  guess 
he  saw  she  had  one.  What  he  did  ask  her  was  whether  she 
didn't  think  an  association  like  that  was  just  what  the 
girl  needed. 

"Why,  yes,  I  suppose  so,"  Violet  assented  dubiously, 
"only  I'm  not  sure  it  isn't  a  little — austere.  The  place 
they  're  going  is  awfully  quiet ;  Rose  and  Rodney  never  go 
there  except  when  they  want  to  get  away  from  absolutely 
everybody.  The  only  people  there  are  some  professors 
and  a  writer  or  two.  And,  of  course,  a  complete  rest  is 
what  Margaret  is  supposed  to  need.  So,  if  the  girl's  been 
having — well,  rather  a  thin  time,  this  might  strike  her  as 
not  very  jolly. — She's  adoring  it  here,  to-day;  any  one 
could  see  that." 

She  went  on,  with  an  earnestness  he  couldn  't  account  for, 
to  sing  Margaret 's  praises,  as  if  she  feared  that  what  she  'd 
just  said  might  have  done  her  cousin  a  disservice,  thrown 
out  of  gear  some  plan  of  hers.  "We've  always  thought  she 
was  a  perfect  wonder,  John  and  I.  The  way  she  waited 
hand  and  foot  on  her  mother  all  those  years — fifteen  any 
how,  after  Uncle  Chauncey  died;  and  managed,  and  kept 
afloat — even  kept  her  looks, — through  it  all.  It  takes  a 
real  person  to  do  that;  I  couldn't  have,  I  know.  I'd  have 
looked  a  hag,  if  I'd  been  through  half  what  Margaret  has. 
And  she  couldn't  have  stood  much  more  of  it.  She  must 
have  been  just  about  desperate — never  showing  a  thing,  of 
course;  she, never  does — when  you  came  along  with  that 
invention  of  yours,  and  made  a  real  job  for  Henry." 

Joe  remarked,  with  a  grin,  that  he  hadn  't  done  anything 


for  Henry,  except  by  being  the  sort  of  person  John  Will 
iamson  had  thought  it  necessary  to  appoint  somebody  to 
watch. 

She  colored  a  little  at  this,  he  thought,  but  went  on 
without  contradicting  it.  "Well,  anyhow,  I  don't  want  to 
interfere  with  any  plan  of  Margaret's.  If  she  wants — •• 
Beatrice,  to  brighten  things  a  bit  and — well,  be  a  sort  of 
mother  to,  I  hope  you  11  let  her  have  her.  And,  of  course," 
she  concluded,  getting  up  to  receive  the  farewell  of  an 
approaching  guest,  "if  yon  could  manage  to  run  down 
there  for  a  while,  that  would  be  great, — for  everybody." 

"I'd  thought  of  sending  Henry,"  he  began,  and  it 
wasn't  until  then  that  he  saw  the  recurrent  gleam  of  that 
enigmatic  smile  of  hers  upon  her  lips.  He  no  longer  sought 
to  interpret  it;  dismissed,  indeed,  the  interpretation  that 
suggested  itself  as  damn  nonsense.  But  there  came  a  faint 
reflection  of  the  same  smile  in  his  face,  and  it  recurred 
when  he  told  Beatrice  she  needn't  count  on  Margaret  and 
Cape  Cod  for  this  summer  unless  she  liked.  "Wanted  to 
be  a  sort  of  mother  to  her,"  eh?  Violet  might  be  mis 
taken  as  to  her  cousin's  plan,  but  she  had  given  him,  he'd 
come  by  then  to  believe,  a  useful  tip. 


The  change  of  the  plan  for  Trixie's  summer  amazed  Joe 
and  thoroughly  alarmed  him  by  bringing  about  his  first 
quarrel  with  his  daughter.  She'd  struck  him  as  being 
oddly  non-committal,  even  ungracious,  about  it,  on  the 
way  home  from  Lake  Forest,  and,  at  one  point  in  his  ex- 
plantation  of  the  change — it  was  substantially  a  restate 
ment  of  Violet's  objections,  though  the  source  of  them  was 
not  acknowledged, — she  'd  uttered  a  short  laugh  and  had  re 
fused  to  tell  him  why.  But  he  was  in  no  mood  for  fault 
finding  with  her,  and,  dropping  the  subject,  wooed  her 
back  into  an  affectionate  humor  with  him  by  telling  her 
stories  and  taking  her  for  a  long  ride.  They,  swung  out 
west  to  the  Fox  River  valley,  and,  by  avoiding  the 
crowded  thoroughfares,  as  his  minute  knowledge  of  the 


A  DETOUR  199 

roads  enabled  him  to  do,  they  had  a  delightful  cruise. 
For  the  last  hour,  she  lay  contentedly  against  his  shoulder, 
so  soft  and  still  that  he  believed  her  to  be  asleep ;  while  he, 
incredulous  of  the  happiness  this  long  delayed  experience 
in  fatherhood  had  brought  him,  could  have  thought  he 
was  dreaming,  too. 

Two  or  three  evenings  later,  without  misgiving,  he 
brought  up  the  matter  of  Margaret  again,  this  time  as  a 
question  comfortably  disposed  of.  He  was  glad,  indeed, 
of  something  tangible  to  discuss  with  her  that  night,  for  a 
trifling  incident  upon  his  return  from  the  office,  just 
before  dinner,  had  been  rankling  absurdly  in  his  mind  ever 
since. 

Anson,  on  letting  him  in  and  being  asked  where  she  was, 
had  expressed  the  correctly  servile  ''belief"  that  she  was 
at  the  telephone.  A  minute  later,  Joe  had  met  her  com 
ing  down  the  hall,  kissed  her  with  his  accustomed  hug,  and 
then,  merely  by  way  of  saying  something,  asked  her  whom 
she'd  been  telephoning  to.  She  answered,  instantly,  "I 
wasn't  telephoning";  adding,  a  moment  later,  "Oh,  it  was 
just  a  wrong  number." 

The  thing  had  been  buzzing  in  his  brain  ever  since  like  a 
plaguey  mosquito.  The  servants  in  that  somewhat  over 
staffed  establishment  were  supposed  to  answer  the  phone, 
and  Beatrice,  lazy  and  disposed  to  lounge  when  there  was 
no  particular  call  upon  her  energy,  didn't  make  a  prac 
tise  of  snatching  their  duties  away  from  them;  she  was 
distinctly  reveling,  poor  child,  in  the  unaccustomed  lux 
ury  of  having  things  done  for  her.  Then  the  form  of 
Anson 's  reply  suggested  a  real  conversation.  And  had 
there  been  about  the  look  of  the  girl,  when  her  eye  first 
fell  upon  him,  a  somewhat  flurried  air?  No,  damn  it, 
there  had  not !  That  was  a  mere  imagining,  promoted  by 
jealousy  that  went  along  with  a  strong  new-born  love  like 
his.  But  why  hadn't  she  said  it  was  a  wrong  number  in 
the  first  place,  rather  than  at  the  end  of  a  palpable  hesi 
tation.  There  must  be  a  dozen  ways  of  explaining  the  con 
tradiction,  only  he  couldn  't  think  of  one  nor  could  he  make 


200         JOSEPH  GREEE  AND  IIIS  DAUGHTER 

up  his  mind  to  ask  her.  It  was  with  a  sense  of  escape 
from  all  this  that  he  launched  a  subject  that  could  be 
talked  about. 

"You  needn't  worry  any  more  about  that  Cape  Cod 
idea,"  he  told  her.  "That's  all  fixed.  I  told  Henry, 
yesterday,  that  I  meant  to  keep  you  round  with  me  for  a 
while  before  you  went  anywhere;  but  he  gave  me  a  sort 
of  a  hint  that  I'd  better  talk  it  over  with  Margaret,  my 
self,  so  I  dropped  in  there  to-night  on  the  way  home.  The 
invitation's  still  open;  any  time  you  want  to  go  down 
there  for  a  week  or  two,  we're  to  let  her  know  a  few  days 
ahead.  But  she  understands  it  won 't  be  for  the  summer. ' ' 

Beatrice  said  rather  dryly,  "I  suppose  she's  broken 
hearted  about  that."  He  suppressed  a  momentary  irri 
tation  over  the  tone  she'd  taken  and  answered  simply  that 
Margaret  was  disappointed,  all  right,  but  that  she'd  been 
perfectly  friendly  about  it. 

' '  They  're  all  perfectly  friendly  with  you,  seems  to  me, ' ' 
the  girl  commented. 

Joe  said  he  was  glad  they  were.  "One  thing  I've 
learned  in  fifty  years,  is  to  take  the  best  advice  I  can  get, 
whenever  I'm  off  my  own  beat.  And  there's  probably 
nothing  I'm  more  ignorant  about  than  bringing  up  young 
girls.  So,  if  Margaret  or  Jennie  MacArthur  or  Mrs.  Will 
iamson  feels  friendly  enough  to  offer  me  any  suggestions, 
I'm  just  that  much  ahead.  So  far  as  I  know,  there  aren't 
any  professional  consultants  in  that  field,  though  it's 
plain  there  ought  to  be." 

All  this  was  said  into  a  vacuum.  She'd  turned,  petu 
lantly,  her  back  upon  him  and  gave  no  indication  even 
that  she'd  heard.  His  patience  under  this  sort  of  treat 
ment  would  have  amazed  Jennie  MacArthur. 

"I  don't  know  just  how  we're  going  to  manage  things," 
he  went  on,  a  propitiatory  good-humor  transforming  the 
words.  "It's  the  biggest  handful  I  ever  tackled.  You 
see,  you  can't  live  here  alone  very  well,  with  just  the 
servants,  if  only  for  the  look  of  the  thing.  It  looks  to  me 
as  if  the  thing  to  do  was  to  hire  some  middle-aged  womaa 


A  DETOUR  201 

to  be  a  sort  of  governess-companion  for  your  housekeeper 
on  the  side.  Then  I  could  go  away,  when  I  had  to,  with 
out  leaving  you  high  and  dry.  I'm  going  to  have  to  be 
away  a  good  deal  too,  this  summer  and  fall  especially. 
Even  when  I'm  not  away,  you're  alone  too  much  in  the 
daytime.  She  could  take  you  to  matinees, — all  sorts  of 
places  where  you  wouldn't  want  to  go  alone.  And  morn 
ings,  she  could  give  you  lessons.  She'd  want  to  be  the 
right  sort,  of  course.  But  there  wouldn  't  be  much  trouble 
about  that;  there  are  plenty  of  them  to  choose  among, — 
some  English  woman,  I  suppose,  would  be  best." 

Still  without  looking  around  at  him,  she  asked,  "What 
kind  of  lessons?  History,  and  French,  and  things  like 
that?" 

Her  tone  was  muffled,  ambiguous ;  and  it  was  this,  more 
than  anything  else,  that  made  him  hesitate.  "Why,  I 
suppose  so,"  he  answered  dubiously. 

"Manners,  too?"  she  inquired.  "How  to  talk  with  an 
English  accent,  and  never  raise  my  voice?  And  what 
kind  of  clothes  to  wear,  so  that  that  nasty  little  Dorothy 
Williamson  can't  laugh  at  me  behind  my  back?" 

"Look  here,  Trix,"  he  commanded.  "We've  been  over 
this  before.  You  agreed  to  learn  their  game.  It's  no 
disgrace  not  to  know  it,  but  it's  silly  to  make  a  fuss  about 
learning  it,  when  to  go  on  not  knowing  it  will  put  you  at 
a  disadvantage.  It  won't  be  hard  to  do.  I  know  a  girl 
who  learned  enough  of  it  to  get  by  with,  on  the  stage,  in 
one  summer.  And  she  was  a  real  rough-neck,  to  begin 
with;  an  illiterate  little  musical-comedy  kid,  in  the  chorus 
till  she  worked  up  an  imitation  stunt  they  let  her  do.  She 
got  a  chance  at  a  part  she  wanted,  but  a  friend  of  hers 
told  her  that,  to  make  good  with  it,  she'd  have  to  change 
her  voice,  speech,  way  of  moving  around, — everything. 
Instead  of  getting  sore,  she  sailed  in  to  do  it;  spent  a 
whole  summer  where  she  had  the  right  sort  of  people 
around,  and  she  didn't  miss  a  trick.  Watched  how  they 
did  things;  listened  to  everything  they  said;  and,  when 
the  piece  went  into  production,  she  walked  on  and  knocked 


'em  cold.  And  she  had  the  time  of  her  life  learning  it, 
too,  she  said. 

' '  You  would,  too,  if  you  'd  take  it  like  that.  But,  if  you 
go  around  flinching  at  everything  and  imagining  people 
are  laughing  at  you,  you  can  be  damn  unhappy.  It  is 
imagination,  mostly,  with  you.  Certainly  no  one  was 
laughing  at  you  last  Sunday,  up  at  "Williamsons'." 

She  whipped  round  upon  him  with  a  furious  contradic 
tion.  "They  were!  A  whole  lot  you  know  about  it! 
You  weren't  there  to  see." 

"I  could  see  you  were  having  what  sounded  like  a  good 
time." 

' '  I  laughed  too  loud,  I  suppose, ' '  she  commented.  ' '  Oh, 
some  of  the  fellows  were  decent  enough.  But  the  girls, 
especially  your  darling  Dodo  .  .  .  Oh,  she  makes  me 
sick!" 

"She's  no  darling  of  mine,"  he  declared — with  a  grin, 
for  the  notion  that  Trix  might  be  jealous  amused  him. 
"Go  after  her,  if  you  don't  like  her.  Beat  her  at  her  own 
game.  Take  her  boys  away  from  her.  Show  her  up. — 
Only  you  won't  do  it  by  wishing  you  could.  Let  me  hire 
you  the  right  sort  of  governess  and  after  she's  showed 
you  the  ropes  you  '11  be  able  to  give  Dodo  the  laugh. ' ' 

"That  isn't  what  you  want  her  for,"  the  girl  said,  with 
sulky  conviction,  at  the  end  of  a  long  stare.  "You  want 
her  because  those  women  have  been  telling  you  how  hor 
rible  it  is  for  me  to  have  any  fun  my  own  way;  going 
anywhere  alone,  or  taking  drives  with  nobody  but  George. 
— George  Burns,  I  mean." — This  in  answer  to  his  sharply 
interrogatory  frown. — "I  suppose  Dodo  would  call  him 
Burns.  They've  made  you  ashamed  of  me,  too,  I  guess. 
That's  why  you  think  I'm  like  that  musical-comedy  kid, 
you  told  me  about.  Did  you  hire  a  governess  for  her  ? ' ' 

"Don't  be  a  fool,  Trix!"  He  hadn't  meant  to  be  as 
sharp  as  that,  though,  and  he  paused  to  get  control  of  a 
quieter  manner.  "  I  'm  sorry,  but  I  guess  you  didn  't  know 
how  that  sounded.  Nobody's  said  a  'word  to  me  about 
Burns,  and  I'd  never  thought  of  there  being  any  special 


A  DETOUR  203 

harm  in  it,  but  of  course  you  ought  to  have  some  one  be 
sides  a  professional  chauffeur  with  you  when  you  go  out 
on  long  drives.  And  when  it  comes  to  entertaining  your 
friends  here,  you  can't  have  young  men  coming  to  see  you 
and  finding  you  alone;  nobody  but  the  servants.  Even 
for  going  anywhere  at  night,  when  I'm  away,  you'll  want 
some  one.  I  hadn't  thought  it  through  as  far  as  that,  be 
fore.  We'll  call  that  settled,  I  guess,  Trix." 

But  he  saw  it  was  anything  but  settled,  in  his  daughter's 
mind.  "All  my  life,"  she  said,  with  a  sort  of  vicious 
quietness,  "I've  had  people  sticking  their  noses  into  the 
things  I  was  doing,  telling  tales  on  me,  making  mother  say 
I  couldn't  do  this  or  it  was  wrong  to  do  that.  And  now, 
you  talk  about  hiring  some  one  to  do  just  that  thing. 
"Well,  it  isn't  what  I  came  here  for.  If  you  trusted  me, 
you  wouldn  't  mind  having  people  coming  to  see  me  without 
a  chaperon  spying  on  me  all  the  time.  But  you  don't 
trust  me;  that's  the  trouble.  You  asked  me  to-night  who 
I'd  been  telephoning  to.  It  wasn't  anybody, — but  if  it  had 
been  I  wouldn't  have  told  you." 

She  was,  beyond  concealment,  crying  now,  and  this 
phenomenon,  while  it  paralyzed  him,  seemed  to  rob  her  of 
even  the  wish  for  self-control.  "You  wouldn't  have 
thought  of  it,  yourself,"  she  sobbed.  "It's  all  been  put 
into  your  head — that  I'm  a  freak  that  has  to  be  taught 
how  to  act,  and  watched  to  see  that  I  don't  do  anything 
awful. — Jennie  MacArthur  and  Mrs.  Williamson — and 
'Margaret'!" 

She  crumpled  her  handkerchief  into  her  fist  and  beat 
on  the  table  with  it.  "I'm  not  going  to  have  your  mis 
tresses  telling  you  what  I'm  to  do,"  she  cried.  "Nor  an 
old  maid  that's  trying  to  marry  you,  either!" 

He  reached  across  and  seized  her  by  the  arms.  "What 
the  devil  do  you  mean  by  that?"  he  roared  at  her.  She 
wasted  no  breath  answering;  her  single-minded  purpose 
was  to  break  out  of  his  grip.  Her  teeth  were  locked,  her 
face  flushed,  her  eyes  blazing.  "You  listen!"  he  went  on 
during  a  panting  lull  in  the  struggle.  "If  you  were  a 


204         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

boy,  you'd  get  the  finest  licking  of  your  young  life  for 
saying  a  thing  like  that.  Being  a  girl,  you  oughtn't  to 
know  enough  to  say  it.  But  this  is  the  fact,  and  don't  you 
ever  forget  it.  Jennie  MacArthur  is  as  good  a  woman  as 
your  mother  is.  And  for  anything  I  know  about  it  one 
way  or  the  other,  Mrs.  Williamson  is,  too.  You  little 
wildcat!  Stop  fighting  and  I'll  let  you  go." 

But  with  an  unexpected  sudden  wrench  that  pulled  him 
a  little  off  balance,  she  broke  away.  "I  don't  have  to 
stay  here, ' '  she  panted  from  the  doorway.  ' '  I  can  go  back 
to  California.  I've  got  the  rest  of  that  thousand  dollars 
— where  you  can 't  find  it. ' '  Another  sob  got  in  the  way  of 
whatever  more  she  had  to  tell  him,  and  she  fled  to  her 
room  and  slammed  the  door  behind  her. 

She  left  her  father  completely  disorganized,  like  a  man 
just  awakened  from  a  nightmare,  tremors  running  through 
his  muscles  in  ripples,  his  mouth  dry,  and  the  only  thought 
he  was  capable  of,  an  incredulous  assertion  that  it  couldn't 
have  happened. 

He  had  been  wont  to  argue  with  Jennie  that  quarrels 
did  him  good,  opened  his  pores,  stimulated  his  mind,  made 
even  his  disposition  more  benevolent.  It  was  nonsense  to 
pretend  that  there  was  anything  poisonous  about  them. 
Evidently,  though,  quarrels  with  his  daughter  went  into 
a  special  class. 

The  sober  processes  of  reflection,  when  he  had  cooled 
down  enough  to  make  them  possible,  brought  him  little 
comfort.  He  had  a  sense  of  irreparable  injury  done  to  a 
precious  fragile  thing.  It  might  be  patched  together  after 
a  fashion,  but  it  could  never  again  be  as  it  had  been  be 
fore.  He  felt  no  abiding  anger  against  the  girl, — was 
unable,  indeed,  to  remember  what  she  had  done  to  provoke 
his  explosion.  He  loved  and  admired  her  more  than  ever ; 
her  courage  in  fighting  him  off,  defying  him,  even  while  his 
hands  had  gripped  her.  No  tears,  then!  No  hint  of 
surrender. 

For  hours,  he  sat  in  the  chair  he'd  risen  from  to 
spring  upon  her,  smoking,  sipping  whisky,  meditating  in 


A  DETOUR  205 

a  mood  of  deepening  melancholy.  Jennie  MacArthur  had 
warned  him  that  his  plan  wouldn't  work,  and  it  looked  as 
if  Jennie,  once  more,  was  right.  It  would  have  worked, 
though,  but  for  his  infernal  temper.  The  girl  was  like 
him;  was  more,  in  every  way,  his  daughter  than  either  of 
them  had  dreamed  possible.  They  might,  if  he  had  not 
smashed  the  possibility  to  bits,  to-night,  have  become  the 
finest  sort  of  comrades — an  alliance,  defensive  and  of 
fensive,  against  the  world!  He'd  like  to  prove  Jennie 
wrong,  for  once. 

Where  the  devil,  he  wondered,  had  Trix  picked  up  that 
fantastic  idea  about  him  and  Jennie?  She  couldn't  have 
thought  of  such  a  thing  by  herself.  Some  one  must  have 
told  her  the  slander  in  so  many  words.  He'd  manage  to 
find  out  who  the  traitor  was,  if  it  was  the  last — no,  the 
next  to  the  last — thing  he  ever  did. 

He  got  up,  stiffly,  feeling  old,  and  went  out  into  the 
passage  on  his  way  to  bed.  Outside  his  daughter's  door 
he  stopped  to  listen.  Until  that  moment,  it  hadn't  oc 
curred  to  him  to  wonder  how  she  had  spent  the  interven 
ing  hours.  Had  they  been  as  miserable  for  her  as  for  him  ? 
Had  she  been  weeping  quietly  over  her  own  defeated  hopes? 
The  thought  brought  a  lump  into  his  throat. 

She  wasn't  weeping  now.  It  was  dead  still  in  there. 
Then  came  her  voice,  young,  clear,  unruffled.  "Is  that 
you,  dad?"  His  own  would  not  at  once  respond  to  com 
mand,  and  she  went  on,  "If  it  is,  come  in."  It  was  an 
invitation  he'd  never  had,  nor  sought,  before. 

She  switched  on  the  night  lamp  as  he  entered,  and  pat 
ted  the  edge  of  the  bed  as  the  place  where  she  wanted  him 
to  sit.  When  he  was  seated,  she  held  out  both  hands  to 
him,  displaying  the  full  length  of  her  bare  arms.  His 
finger  prints  were  upon  them  both,  in  the  livid  discolora 
tion  of  bruises. 

"Good  God,  Trix,"  he  cried,  aghast,  "did  I  do  that  to 
you?" 

She  nodded,  with  a  smile  of  friendly  mischief.  "I 
bruise  awfully  easy,"  she  explained.  "Sometimes  when  it 


206         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

hasn't  hurt  at  all.  It's  been  kind  of  lucky,  in  a  way.  It 
kept  grandfather  and  the  rest  from  getting  rough  with 
me.  They  never  punished  me  except  by  shutting  me  up, 
and  I  could  usually  get  out,  somehow." 

"You  can't  go  back  to  that,"  he  said. 

"No,"  she  admitted  soberly.  "I  couldn't  go  back  there, 
even  if  Mr.  Whittington  wasn't  going  to  marry  mother. 
But  I  can  go  back  to  Hollywood.  I'm  practically  sure  I 
can  get  a  job  there." 

"Then  you  can't  forgive  me?"  he  asked. 

' '  Of  course  I  do ! "  She  seemed  astonished  at  the  ques 
tion.  "It  was  mostly  my  fault,  anyhow.  It  seemed  as  if 
I  just  had  to  get  you  mad.  I  don't  know  why — ex 
actly.  But  I  'm  crazy  about  you,  dad.  I  think  you  're  the 
most  wonderful  man  in  the  world." 

"Then  why,"  he  demanded,  "do  you  talk  about  going 
off  and  leaving  me  ?  Is  it  just  because  I  wanted  to  hire  a 
— companion  for  you  f ' ' 

She  stirred  uneasily  at  the  question;  it  wasn't  one,  ap 
parently,  that  she  had  a  categorical  answer  for.  "I  could 
have  got  on  well  enough  with  my  mother,"  she  said  at 
last,  "if  grandpa  and  grandma  hadn't  kept  butting  in  all 
the  time,  putting  ideas  into  her  head  and  making  her  go 
back  on  things  she  'd  promised.  I  hate  nosey  interfering 
people,  whoever  they  are. — So  when  I  saw  those  women 
deciding  things  for  you — about  me — changing  you  round 
just  as  they  liked,  it  made  me  so  mad  I  didn't  care  what 
happened."  She  added,  after  a  moment's  pause,  "I'm 
glad  I  found  out  about — Miss  MacArthur,  though." 

"Trix,"  he  asked,  "do  you  mind  telling  me — it's  just  a 
matter  of  curiosity — who  put  an  idea  like  that  into  your 
head?  It  was  a  hell  of  a  thing  to  do,  whoever  did  it." 

"Why,  nobody  did  it,"  she  declared,  instantly,  wide- 
eyed.  "Nobody  but  you  and  her.  The  way  you  acted 
together,  her  calling  you  Joe  and  knowing  such  a  lot  about 
me  and  telling  you  you  needn  't  stay  and  work  that  day  un 
less  you  liked.  When  you  were  supposed  to  be  her  boss! 
And  the  way  you  liked  it,  and  wanted  to  sit  around  and 


A  DETOUR  207 

talk.  I  don't  know.  It  struck  me  as  natural,  that  was 
all." 

"But  how  could  it?  That's  what  I  want  to  know. 
How  could  you  think  of  a  thing  like  that?  Or  don't  you 
know  what  it  means? — I  can't  even  talk  to  you  about  it." 

She  smiled  up  at  him,  incredibly  composed,  gentle  with 
his  embarrassment.  ' '  Dad, ' '  she  remonstrated,  ' '  am  I  sup 
posed  to  think  you've  lived  all  these  years  since  you  left 
mother — like  a  monk  in  a  monastery?" 

Had  he  been  a  mere  disinterested  bystander,  his  fine  ear 
might  have  spotted  that  line  as  a  quotation,  picked  up, 
treasured, — rehearsed  perhaps.  As  it  was,  nothing  of 
the  sort  occurred  to  him.  He  stared  at  her  in  astonished 
silence  while  she,  having  got  the  whip  hand  of  him  now, 
went  on : 

"You  hate  having  me  know  things  like  that,  and  if  I 
was  going  to  stay  with  you  I  suppose  I'd  have  to  pretend 
I  didn't.  I  guess  that's  the  real  reason  I  can't.  You 
want  a  nice  little  girl,  and  I  don't  believe  I  ever  was  that. 
I  always  hated  to  be  bossed.  I  wanted  to  find  things  out 
for  myself.  But  everything  they  found  I  wanted  to  do, 
they  told  me  I  mustn't.  They  were  afraid  I  was  going  to 
be  like  you  and  they  were  trying  to  break  my  will.  They 
didn't,  though,"  She  paused  to  smile  at  him.  "I  guess  I 
turned  out  like  you,  after  all." 

' '  Bless  your  heart ! "  he  murmured. 

His  vision  of  her  blurred  with  tears,  and  at  the  invita 
tion  of  her  hands  he  bent  down  and  kissed  her,  she  holding 
him,  for  a  moment,  in  a  tight  embrace.  Then  she  pushed 
him  away  and  with  her  palms  blotted  the  tears  from  her 
own  eyes. 

' '  I  hated  you,  once, ' '  she  said,  with  a  shaky  laugh.  ' '  Oh, 
for  years  and  years.  Because  you  left  me  there  with  them. 
I  didn't  think  I  was  going  to  love  you  when  I  got  your 
letter.  The  reason  I  came  was  because  you  said  I  was  of 
age  and  had  a  right  to  decide  things  for  myself.  I  made 
up  my  mind  I  'd  hold  you  to  that.  I  thought  if  I  got  you 
sort  of  silly  about  me,  it  would  be  easy  to  make  you.  I 


208         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

didn't  figure  on  getting — silly  about  you.  But  I  have, 
and  that's  why  I've  got  to  go  away  again." 

He  tried  to  protest  that  this  conclusion  was  nonsense, 
but  she  wasn't  ready  to  hear  him  yet.  "I'd  hate  any 
governess  you  hired  for  me.  I'd  hate  anybody  who  told 
you  tales  about  me — or  advised  you  what  to  do  with  me. 
I  wouldn't  mind  if  I  didn't  love  you.  I'd  get  what  I 
wanted,  somehow, — just  the  way  I  always  did  at  home. 
But  I'd  be  m-miserable — treating  you  like  that. — Because 
you  aren't  like  them." 

She  was  weeping  now  in  a  way  that  made  continued 
speech  impossible.  She  sat  erect  and  clung  to  him.  "Oh, 
dad,"  she  wailed,  "I  don't  want  to  go." 

Until  she  was  quiet  he  held  her  without  a  word,  but 
when  the  soothing  of  his  hands  had  had  its  effect,  he  said, 
"All  right,  Trix.  You  win.  I  guess  I've  been  a  fool 
about  it.  I  hope  so,  anyway.  But  I  can't  let  you  go. 
Not  after  this!" 

Her  eyes  were  luminous  through  her  tears.  He'd  never, 
he  thought,  seen  anything  so  rapturously  lovely.  "You 
mean  it,  dad?"  she  cried.  "You'll  let  me  be  a  real  grown 
up?  Run  your  house  for  you,  and  everything? — Like 
Margaret  Craven  does  Henry's ?" 

He  roared  at  that,  and  she  laughed  with  him,  but  at 
the  end  of  it  she  asked,  for  reassurance,  "Really,  dad?" 

"It's  on  the  level,"  he  told  her  soberly.  "You  can 
write  your  own  contract,  little  girl." 

There  was  another  damned  echo  in  that,  and  it  was  a 
moment  before  her  enthusiasm  got  an  appropriate  response 
from  him.  She  shook  him  by  the  shoulders.  "Say  you 
think  it's  going  to  be  wonderful,"  she  commanded. 

"Yes,  my  dear,"  he  said;  "I  believe  it  is." 

4 

John  Williamson  surprised  Joe  by  coming  to  him  with 
an  idea  about  flax.  An  eccentric  gentleman  farmer  he 
knew  had  been  talking  to  him  and,  more  or  less,  frighten 
ing  him  about  it.  He  was  a  retired  wholesale  grocer, 


A  DETOUE  209 

Nicholson  by  name,  and  he  had  a  big  place  out  on  the 
Fox  River.  He  devoted  an  energetic  leisure  to  the  culti 
vation  of  hobbies,  semi-  or  pseudo-scientific,  and  he  'd  been 
experimenting,  for  the  past  two  or  three  years — since  a 
fortuitous  war  refugee  had  given  him  the  idea, — with  the 
growing  of  Belgian  flax,  the  plan  being  to  process  it  by 
hand  and  provide  a  domestic  winter  occupation  for 
farmers'  wives. 

He  was  bitterly  skeptical  about  Joe's  project  for  mak 
ing  any  use  of  American  seed  flax,  and  he  went  on  to  say 
some  things  that  worried  John  a  little.  Flax  was  very 
funny  stuff;  it  was  supposed  to  exhaust  the  soil.  This 
was  why,  in  America,  it  had  always  been  a  pioneer  crop. 
Fresh-broken,  virgin  soil  could  stand  it;  even,  apparently, 
benefited  by  it;  but  two  or  three  seasons  was  all  it  was 
good  for.  The  growth  became  sickly,  and  the  crop  had 
to  be  abandoned  altogether.  The  center  of  American  flax 
production  was  always  on  the  move,  westward,  in  search 
of  new  land. 

Nicholson  had  got  hold  of  a  theory  that  flax  didn't 
really  exhaust  the  soil;  it  was  specially  liable  to  disease, 
the  fact  was,  and  the  germs  of  the  disease  accumulated  in 
the  old  fields  from  year  to  year  until  they  killed  the 
crop.  But  it  didn't  work  that  way  abroad.  They  had 
grown  flax  in  the  same  fields  in  Belgium  for  hundreds  of 
years.  Nicholson  was  confident  that  he  had  explained  the 
difference.  In  Europe,  they  harvested  the  crop  by  hand. 
And  they  didn't  cut  it  off  above  the  ground  either;  they 
pulled  it  up  by  the  roots, — and,  by  so  doing,  baffled  the 
disease  germs. 

If  he  was  right  about  this,  and  there  was  no  doubt  in  his 
own  mind  about  it,  here  was  the  end  of  any  dream,  such 
as  John  had  put  his  money  into,  of  a  large-scale  mechanical 
production  of  linen.  It  was  decreed  by  God  to  be  a  hand 
process,  from  the  very  harvesting  of  the  crop.  The  old 
Scotch  grocer  had  a  strong  strain  of  Presbyterian  re 
ligion  in  him,  though  he  swore  like  a  sergeant  in  the  Na 
tional  Guard. 


210         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"He  filled  me  full  of  details,"  John  concluded,  "and  I 
can't  remember  them;  but  that's  the  bones  of  it.  I'd 
like,  to  take  you  out  to  meet  him  some  time,  and  hear  for 
yourself  what  he's  got  to  say." 

Joe  said,  seriously,  that  he'd  be  very  glad  to  go.  There 
was  nothing  new  about  old  Nicholson's  facts,  and  nothing 
very  alarming  about  his  theories,  but  he'd  be  worth  talk 
ing  to  anyhow,  and  his  stand  of  Belgian  flax  worth  see 
ing.  If  that  stuff  could  be  made  to  grow  in  this  soil  and 
climate,  it  might  be  worth  a  lot  to  them. 

He  didn't  mention  to  John  that,  for  three  months,  he 
had  put  in  odd  hours  designing  a  harvester  that  would 
pull  flax  up  by  the  roots  not  for  the  purpose  of  baffling 
the  disease  germs  but  of  adding  four  inches  or  so  to  the 
length  of  the  fiber.  He  was  always  as  secretive  with  his 
immature  idea  as  a  cat  with  her  blind  kittens. 

"All  right,"  said  John,  "we'll  plan  to  go  out  there 
some  time  within  the  next  week  or  so." 

"Why  not  call  him  up,"  Joe  asked,  "and  see  if  he's 
there  now?  If  he's  really  got  anything  to  tell  me,  the 
sooner  I  know  it,  the  better.  Unless  you've  got  something 
to  do  that  you  can 't  get  out  of, ' '  he  added,  for  John  looked 
dubious  and  unhappy. 

"Why,  I  have,  as  a  matter  of  fact,"  he  said,  uncer 
tainly. 

Joe  grinned  in  his  beard.  He  could  manage  it  to-mor 
row,  he  said,  though  it  was  a  pretty  full  day.  And  he 
was  going  north  to-morrow  night. 

"To-morrow's  impossible  for  me,"  said  John.  "Oh, 
damn  it,  yes,  I'll  make  it  to-day.  If  Nicholson's  there. 
I'd  promised  Dodo  I'd  go  to  a  ball-game  with  her — Giants 
and  the  Cubs.  But  she'll  let  me  off,  I  guess." 

Nicholson  was  at  home  and  would  be  glad  to  see  them. 
So  the  date  with  Dorothy  had  to  be  broken.  (Joe  made 
a  mental  note  to  tell  Trix  about  this  and  a  promise  to 
take  her  to  the  game  to-morrow.  Ball-games  were  a  thing 
he  hadn't  thought  of  as  a  resource  for  her.)  The  two  ate 
lunch  together  and  immediately  afterward,  in  Joe's  road- 


A  DETOUR  211 

ster,  drove  out  the  Elgin  road  to  Nicholson's.  It  was  a 
fine  hot  July  day,  sultry  and  rather  still,  with  the  pos 
sibility,  low  down  in  the  western  sky,  of  a  summer  storm. 

Joe  enjoyed  the  afternoon  thoroughly.  He'd  never 
liked  John  Williamson  so  well  before;  he  had  never  had 
so  little  the  sense  that  they  belonged  to  two  different 
species.  They  talked,  for  the  first  time,  at  ease,  and  found, 
within  rather  narrow  limits,  a  common  language. 

As  for  old  Nicholson,  he  proved  clear  treasure  trove. 
He  was  wild,  possibly  a  little  mad,  utterly  unsound  in  all 
his  scientific  ideas;  and  his  manners,  though  somewhat 
more  elaborate,  were  as  outrageous  as  Joe's  own.  But  he 
was  a  perfectly  real  unaffected  person,  happily  living  a 
life  that  was  just  about  as  he  wanted  it,  and  as  sublimely 
indifferent  to  collective  opinion  as  he  was  to  the  facts  of 
physics  and  chemistry. 

He  and  Joe,  as  they  tramped  out  to  the  flax  fields  and 
back  to  the  "laboratories,"  and  as  they  sat  in  his  veranda 
discussing  a  hospitable  supply  of  Scotch  and  soda,  argued 
and  swore  at  each  other,  until,  by  five  o'clock,  they  were 
old  friends.  It  was  about  this  time  that  John  was  called 
to  the  telephone.  Joe  took  advantage  of  the  interruption 
for  a  look  at  the  sky. 

"We're  going  to  have  a  hell  of  a  big  rain  before  night," 
he  remarked. 

Old  Nicholson  nodded.  "I  could  have  told  you  that 
this  morning,  when  you  telephoned,  only  you  wouldn't 
have  believed  me.  For  that  matter,  I  could  have  told  you 
a  week  ago.  Got  it  written  down  in  my  almanac,  if  you 
want  to  look.  I've  got  a  weather  bureau  of  my  own,  out 
here,  that  makes  those  meteorological  experts  the  govern 
ment  pays  good  money  to,  look  foolish." 

Joe  would  have  asked  for  a  look  at  the  almanac  (it 
ought  to  be  an  amusing  thing  to  see)  if  Williamson  hadn't 
come  back,  just  then,  with  something  else  to  talk  about. 
It  was  Violet  who  had  telephoned.  Dorothy  had  driven 
her  out  to  Hickory  Hill — this  was  Graham  Stannard's  and 
Rush  Wollaston's  farm — and,  with  the  storm  coming  up, 


212         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

she  didn't  care  to  let  the  girl  drive  back.  The  Nichol 
son  place  was  only  three  or  four  miles  away,  and  Violet's 
idea  was  that  John  should  pick  them  up  at  Hickory  Hill 
and  drive  them  home.  "I  told  them,"  John  concluded, 
"that  we'd  come  out  in  your  car,  but  that  I  didn't  think 
you'd  mind  taking  me  over  there,  and  perhaps  take  Violet 
home  in  my  place.  That  little  roadster  of  Dodo's  would 
be  a  tight  fit  for  three.  It's  taking  you  a  lot  out  of  your 
way,  of  course." 

The  request  pleased  Joe.  It  was  of  a  piece  with  the 
more  companionable  feeling  he'd  been  aware  of  between 
them  all  the  afternoon.  He  would  be  late  for  dinner — and 
he'd  been  punctual  as  a  commuter  since  Trix  had  been 
promoted  to  the  head  of  his  household, — but  he'd  con 
trive  to  telephone  from  somewhere  and  let  her  know  what 
to  expect. 

They  left  Nicholson's  at  once,  but  the  stop  at  Hickory 
Hill  used  up  a  good  deal  more  time  than  they'd  counted 
upon.  They  were  an  attractive  lot  of  people,  there,  with 
whom  it  wras  easy  to  linger  and  chat ; — Miss  Wollaston, 
whom  Joe  had  already  met  at  the  Cravens';  her  brother, 
John,  convalescing  from  his  desperate  illness  of  the  spring ; 
the  two  boys,  and,  utterly  in  her  element,  young  Sylvia. 
They  had  an  amusing  house  which  Joe  had  to  be  shown 
over.  Then  there  were  chains  to  be  put  on  the  cars,  and 
the  vigorous  discussions  of  what  would  be  the  best  road, 
in  view  of  the  now  imminent  storm.  No  road  was  good  all 
the  way,  and  most  of  the  detours  would  be  tricky  in  bad 
weather. 

It  amused  Joe  to  note  that  there  never  was  the  slightest 
question  in  John's  mind  as  to  how  their  party  of  four 
should  be  divided  up.  John,  and  nobody  else,  was  go 
ing  to  drive  his  precious  Dorothy  over  those  tricky  de 
tours.  Violet,  he  believed  from  a  gleam  he  caught  in  her 
eye,  was  somewhat  dryly  aware  of  the  same  thing. 

Joe,  with  Violet,  started  out  ahead;  but  the  position 
was  reversed  as  soon  as  it  began  to  rain,  for  he  pulled  out 
to  the  side  of  the  road  at  once  and  began  putting  up  the 


A  DETOUR  213 

storm  curtains,  and  the  others  came  on  by,  passing  with  a 
derisive  honk  from  John  and  a  shouted  comment,  only 
half  audible,  from  Dorothy.  Her  idea  seemed  to  be  that 
the  storm  wasn't  going  to  amount  to  anything,  and  that 
the  rain  felt  good  anyway. 

"They'll  go  on  like  that  till  they're  soaked,"  Violet 
said  discontentedly,  "and  then  they'll  put  up  the  curtains 
to  keep  the  wetness  in.  I'm  like  a  cat  about  getting  wet," 
she  added.  "I  hate  it." 

Joe's  car  had  a  right-hand  drive,  and  his  lever,  es 
pecially  with  the  hand-brake  set  and  the  storm  curtains 
up,  barred  his  entrance  to  the  driving  seat.  It  was  rain 
ing  in  good  earnest  before  he'd  finished  with  the  cur 
tains,  and,  in  the  light  of  that  last  remark  of  hers,  he 
hesitated  to  ask  her  to  get  out  so  that  he  could  get  in. 

"I  can  climb  in  over  you,"  he  suggested,  "if  you  don't 
mind  being  squeezed  a  bit." 

"I  don't  mind,"  she  said,  and  he  clambered  in,  over 
her  knees.  Then  he  reached  across  her  and  buttoned  the 
last  curtain  fast. 

"You're  wet  already,"  she  remarked,  laying  her  hand 
upon  his  sleeve. 

He  told  her  it  was  nothing,  but  that,  if  she'd  let  him, 
he  ?d  take  off  his  coat.  She  nodded,  and  helped  him  extri 
cate  his  arms  from  the  sleeves.  He  chucked  the  wet  coat 
into  a  little  boot  behind  the  seat,  released  his  brake,  and 
drove  on. 

The  state  of  his  mind  and  feeling  toward  her,  when 
they  had  started  out  from  Hickory  Hill,  would  have  satis 
fied  the  most  exacting  husband  in  the  world.  John  Will 
iamson,  had  he  possessed  the  clairvoyant  power  to  read 
it,  would  probably  have  smiled  over  it  as  not  quite  cred 
ibly  austere.  No  human  male  of  virile  years  could  be  ex 
pected  to  set  out  upon  a  long  drive  with  as  pretty  a 
woman  as  Violet  for  his  sole  companion  without  a  little 
more  disposition  to  improve  the  shining  hour — oh,  in  a 
perfectly  harmless  decent  way,  of  course — than  could  be 
read  in  Joe's  intentions. 


214         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Her  sensuous  appeal  to  him  was  completely  in  abeyance. 
She  was  John  Williamson's  wife,  and  John  was,  after  all, 
a  thoroughly  good  fellow.  She  was  also,  in  a  way  he'd 
never  been  lucky  enough  to  experience  before,  willing  to 
make  friends  with  him.  He  wanted  her  for  a  friend,  on 
Trix's  account  as  well  as  on  his  own.  And  then,  last  and 
and  first  and  all  the  time,  he  was  that  newly  discovered 
being,  Trix's  father.  Emotions  awakened  on  the  night  of 
his  quarrel  with  her  hadn't  had  time  to  subside  into  com 
monplace  tepidity.  The  chance  that  Trix's  father  should 
even  glance  aside  at  the  amorous  possibilities  of  another 
woman  would  have  been  unthinkable  to  him — when  he 
left  Hickory  Hill.  But  when  he  started  the  car,  after  that 
pause  to  put  the  curtains  up,  there  had  been  a  change. 

The  subtlety  of  the  sense  perceptions,  when  they  are 
trained  and  relied  upon,  as  Joe's  were,  is  beyond  language, 
altogether.  It  was  with  perfect  innocence  that  he  sug 
gested  it  mightn't  be  necessary  for  her  to  get  out  of  the 
car  in  order  to  let  him  in,  if  she  didn't  mind  being  squeezed 
a  bit.  But  some  quality  of  her  voice  when  she  answered, 
"I  don't  mind,"  roused  him.  She  had  inflected  it  in  a 
thoroughly  matter-of-fact  way,  too.  There  was  the  same 
message  in  the  feel  of  her  body  as  he  crowded  across  it, 
in  the  non-withdrawal  of  her  breast  from  contact  with  his 
arm  as  he  buttoned  the  curtains,  in  her  discovery  of  the 
wetness  of  his  coat  and  in  the  way  she  helped  him  out  of  it 
A  series  of  acts  which  could  have  been  described  in  pre 
cisely  the  same  words,  might  have  told  him  nothing  at  all, 
might  have  left  him  as  coolly  unconscious  of  her  sex  as  he  'd 
been  when  he  stopped  the  car.  There  wasn't  the  faintest 
doubt  in  him  of  the  authenticity  of  the  message.  Whether 
she'd  meant  to  convey  it,  or  even  was  aware  she  had,  he 
couldn't  feel  sure. 

He  called  up  a  sullen  resistance  to  meet  it.  He  drove 
bruskly  and  hard  through  the  pounding  rain.  His  left 
hand  was  kept  busy  sweeping  the  windshield  clear  with 
the  squeeze,  and  every  time  his  arm  came  back  to  the 
driving  position,  it  had  to  crowd  its  way  in  beside  her 


A  DETOUR  215 

body.  There  was  nothing  tender  about  the  way  he  did  it. 
He  talked,  doggedly,  dully,  about  old  Nicholson  and  his 
flax  and  his  mad  ideas.  He  talked  about  the  Wollastons 
and  the  success  John 's  wife  was  making  at  Ravinia.  Any 
thing  that  would  press  back  his  consciousness — and  his 
awareness  of  hers — that  they  were  shut  in  together  snug 
and  close  against  the  storm,  alone  and  secure;  of  their 
bodily  warmth,  the  nearness  of  flesh  to  flesh. 

She  did  nothing  to  help  him.  She  said  little,  made  no 
conversation  of  her  own.  And  what  she  did  say  was  no 
longer  friendly,  but  curt,  preoccupied.  Well,  he  knew — 
he  knew  too  damned  well — what  her  preoccupation  was. 

He  gave  over  trying  to  talk  at  last,  and  drove  all  the 
harder.  He  could  feel  his  heart  pounding  like  a  sulky 
motor.  The  rain  had  increased  to  a  cloud-burst.  It 
looked  like  a  solid  wall  of  water  he  was  driving  into. 
There  was  only  a  lurid  dusk  of  daylight  left  and  the  two 
misty  pencils  from  his  head-lights  illuminated  nothing. 

"I  suppose  it's  dangerous  to  go  on  through  this,"  she 
remarked  indifferently. 

"It'd  be  a  damn  sight  more  dangerous  to  stop,"  he 
growled  and  didn't  know  whether  she  had  heard  or  not. 
She  gave  no  sign,  anyhow,  that  he  could  hear  or  feel,  and 
he  didn't  turn  to  look. 

But  within  a  minute  or  two  the  question  of  going  on 
was  settled  for  him.  He  had  been  balancing  the  car  on 
the  crown  of  a  newly  worked  dirt  road.  It  was  a  trick 
comparable  to  walking  a  tight-rope,  and  when  a  loose 
stone  threw  him  a  little  to  one  side  the  car  instantly  be 
came  unsteerable.  He  killed  the  motor  and  with  the  clutch 
in,  braked  as  hard  as  he  dared,  which  wasn't  much,  to 
check  their  momentum,  but  there  was  no  way  to  stop  their 
side-slip.  The  only  question  was  whether  they  would  bring 
up  in  a  ditch,  in  which  case  the  car  would  no  doubt  roll 
over,  or  against  a  cut-down  bank.  It  depended  on  which 
was  there. 

Violet  laughed  as  she  felt  them  going,  but  not,  he  noted, 
the  sort  of  laugh  one  might  expect.  There  was  nothing 


216         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

of  panic  in  it.  It  was  only  a  matter  of  seconds  before 
they  brought  up  against  the  bank  and  stopped  with  a  jolt 
which  threw  her  violently  upon  him. 

For  a  moment,  her  body  was  like  steel,  every  muscle 
stretched  taut;  but  even  so  she  made  no  movement  away 
from  him.  He  eased  the  position  of  his  shoulder,  by  slip 
ping  it  under  her,  and  at  that,  with  a  gasp,  she  went  soft. 
His  arm  closed  round  her  and  held  her  where  she  was. 

"You're  a  good  sport,"  he  told  her  hoarsely.  "There's 
no  telling  where  you're  going  to  bring  up  when  you  start 
a  side-slip  like  that." 

Her  answer  was  hardly  articulate.  " — been  slipping 
a  long  while — "  was  what  he  thought  he  heard. 

He  felt  an  imperious  need  to  see  her  face,  and  reach 
ing  out  with  his  free  hand  he  switched  on  the  dash  lamp. 
She  flinched  at  the  faint  glow  but  made  no  spoken  pro 
test.  The  little  light  made  the  outer  darkness  deeper. 
The  rain  shut  them  in  like  a  many  folded  curtain.  "Oh, 
God!"  he  whispered  helplessly.  Then,  with  a  laugh,  "I 
guess  there's  nothing  we  can  do  about  it." 

"Not  a  thing,"  she  murmured. 

He  pulled  her  up  higher  so  that  her  head  fell  back  upon 
his  shoulder,  and  kissed  her  up-turned  mouth,  hotly,  un 
equivocally.  Then  he  drew  back  and  stared  down  into 
her  face. 

Her  eyes,  wide  open,  luminous,  returned  his  gaze  with 
something  in  them  that  confounded  him; — an  impossible 
thing.  Innocence !  The  incredulous  half -terrified  awaken 
ing  of  a  new  surmise !  She  was  a  mother  of  a  grown  girl. 
She  had  been  married  the  better  part  of  twenty  years. 
But  she  made  him  think  of  Beatrice. 

He  shifted  her  over  to  her  own  side  of  the  seat,  gently 
enough  but  with  a  movement  of  sudden  resolution;  then, 
he  clenched  his  hands  on  the  wheel.  "We  can't  go  on 
with  this,"  he  said,  holding  his  voice  as  steady  as  he 
could.  "It  isn't  easy  to  pull  up,  but  it  can  be  done." 

He  didn't  look  at  her;  gazed  out  fixedly  through  the 
windshield  as  if  he'd  been  driving  the  car.  But  he  was 


A  DETOUR  217 

aware  of  her,  slumped  down  a  little  in  her  seat  and  shud 
dering.  She  gave  no  indication  of  listening  to  him,  but 
he  plunged  heavily  on,  in  spurts.  The  mess  had  got  to  be 
cleared  up  somehow,  now,  before  it  grew  any  worse. 

"That's  the  way  we  feel  about  each  other  all  right; 
there's  no  getting  away  from  that.  Have  from  the  first, 
I  guess.  .  .  .  But  it  isn't  the  only  way, — not  with  me 
anyhow.  .  .  .It's  nobody's  fault  this  happened.  Just 
bad  luck.  And  there's  no  harm  done,  yet.  .  .  .  It's  a 
string  we  can't  play  out,  that's  all.  We  don't  want  to 
play  it  out.  You  don't  want  to  make  a  fool  of  your  hus 
band,  and  neither  do  I.  And  I  do  want  to  be  friends  with 
you — the  other  way.  I  want  you  for  a  friend,  for  Bea 
trice.  And  this  would  spoil  all  that.  We  can't  have  it 
"both  ways.  And  we  can't  go  half-way  and  stop.  It's 
got  to  be  all  or  nothing — with  us. — I'm  not  saying  it's 
easy. ' '  His  voice  rose  and  his  grip  on  the  wheel  tightened. 
"It's  a  hell  of  a  thing — the  way  it — jumps  on  you,  out  of 
the  bushes.  But  it's  not  the  only  thing  in  the  world." 

She  turned  upon  him,  now,  and  the  movement  brought 
his  eyes  round  to  her  for  the  first  time  since  he'd  begun 
speaking.  She  was  still  trembling,  and  her  eyes  were 
bright,  but  with  a  furious  anger.  "Oh,  you're — unspeak 
able  ! ' '  she  cried. 

"For  telling  the  truth?" 

"The  truth!"  Rage  made  her  almost  voiceless.  "I 
wouldn't  have  listened  as  long  as  I  did  if  I'd  understood 
what  you  meant.  The  beastly  thing  you  meant." 

"We  meant  the  same  thing,  for  a  minute  or  two,"  he 
told  her  bluntly.  "It  shocked  you  to  realize  it.  Well,  it 
shocked  me,  too, — though  you  may  not  believe  it.  And  I 
thought  the  only  way  for  us  to  get  back  on  the  other 
"basis — as  friends  ..." 

Frantically,  she  snatched  the  word  away  from  him. 
"Friends?  With  you?  After  the — beastly  things  you've 
done — and  said?" 

"  It 's  the  saying  that 's  the  crime, ' '  he  commented  grimly. 
"What  we  did  wouldn't  have  mattered,  to  you,  I  guegs, 


218         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

if  we'd  pretended  it  was  nothing. — Aren't  you  any  realer 
than  that?" 

"If  you  speak  to  me  again,"  she  declared  wildly,  "I'll 
get  out  of  the  car.  I'll  wade  in  the  mud  till  I  find  some 
body  who  '11  come  back  and  ..."  She  shrank  away  from 
him,  leaving  the  threat  to  be  guessed  at,  buried  her  face 
in  her  hands  and  began  crying,  like  a  child. 

He  clenched  the  wheel,  fighting  down  the  impulse  to 
take  her  up  in  his  arms  again.  He  knew  what  would 
happen  if  he  did.  She'd  struggle  for  a  minute,  and  then 
go  soft  again — and  they'd  be  back  where  they  were  be 
fore.  The  old  Adam  in  him  was  grinning  at  him  for  a 
fool  to  have  taken  her  so  seriously.  Even  a  prudential 
consideration  whispered  that  she'd  be  less  dangerous — 
less  troublesome,  anyhow;  she  couldn't  be  dangerous — so 
dealt  with,  than  as  now.  But  he  sat  still  and  the  wave 
passed,  leaving  him  cool,  unmoved,  as  if  the  storm  had 
never  been. 

Outside,  the  storm  was,  he  finally  decided,  thinning.  He 
looked  cautiously  round  at  Violet.  She'd  about  stopped 
crying,  too,  though  her  face  was  still  buried  in  her  hands. 
' '  If  you  '11  let  me  out, ' '  he  said,  "  I  '11  see  what  can  be  done 
about  getting  started,  again." 

She  stepped  down  into  the  road  without  a  word  or  a 
glance  at  him.  When  he  came  back,  twenty  minutes  later, 
with  some  boards  he'd  found,  she  was  at  first  nowhere  to 
be  seen,  but  presently  he  made  her  out  by  the  faint  day 
light  that  was  returning  as  the  sky  cleared,  up  on  the  bank 
a  little  distance  away,  looking  down  the  road.  He  gave  no 
sign  of  having  seen  her,  but  when  he  went  to  work  jacking 
up  the  wheels  and  sliding  the  boards  under  them  she  came 
down  and  asked  him,  composedly  enough,  if  he  needed  her 
help.  She  remained  near  by,  just  the  same,  when  he  told 
her  he  did  not,  and  even  volunteered  a  remark  about  the 
weather.  She  asked  to  have  the  curtains  taken  off  be 
fore  they  started  on  again,  and  a  something  peremptory 
in  her  voice  when  she  said  it  was  all  that  slanted  in 
any  way  toward  what  had  happened  between  them.  She 


A  DETOUR  219 

took  her  place  beside  him  with  no  appearance  of  hesita 
tion. 

They  had  a  wild  mile  or  two  slithering  over  .those  in 
clined  planes  of  clay  which  made  what  was  supposed  to 
be  a  road.  Repeatedly  they  began  sliding  toward  one  of 
the  ditches  or  the  other,  and  it  wanted  all  his  skill  and 
sometimes  most  of  his  strength  to  avoid  disaster.  She  said 
very  little  but  she  showed  a  perfectly  normal  concern  for 
his  success,  and  by  the  time  they  were  safely  upon  gravel 
again  he  felt  that  she  was,  in  balance  and  tone,  much  the 
same  person  with  whom  he'd  left  Hickory  Hill.  But  of 
her  intentions  toward  him,  the  sort  of  modus  vivendi,  if 
any,  she  meant  to  offer  him,  he  had  no  inkling  whatever. 

He  was  conscious  of  a  growing  intangibility  about  her  as 
she  became  more  at  ease.  Indeed,  it  struck  him,  amusedly, 
at  something  she  said,  that  she'd  have  said  just  that  thing, 
and  in  just  that  tone,  to  Jeffrey,  her  chauffeur.  But  his 
last  impression  of  her  that  day  was  to  be  of  a  different 
sort. 

They  had  sloAved  down  for  a  right-angle  turn  in  the 
road  when  simultaneously  they  saw  the  other  car,  stand 
ing  in  a  drive  that  led  up  to  a  big  comfortable-looking 
farm-house.  Joe  stopped  at  once,  and  began  backing  to 
turn  in. 

"You  needn't  do  that,"  she  said  sharply.  "I  can  get 
out  right  here."  She  added,  when  he  went  on  without 
obeying  her,  "I've  already  been  in  the  mud,  so  it's  too 
late  for  that." 

She  was  fumbling  with  the  door-handle  so,  instead  of 
cutting  forward,  he  went  on  backing  the  car,  across  the 
culvert  and  up  the  drive.  He  made  her  no  other  answer 
until  she  demanded  furiously,  "Why  don't  you  do  as  I 
say? — What  are  you  going  to  do?" 

"I  don't  even  know  your  husband's  in  that  house.  I 
suppose  he  is.  But  I'm  not  going  to  leave  you  till  I  can 
turn  you  over  to  him — as  good  as  I  got  you." 

Again  he  saw  she  was  trembling  violently.  "You — 
cad/"  she  whispered. 


220         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"I'm  not  going  to  tell  him  anything,"  he  said.  "I'm 
going  to  let  him  have  a  good  look  at  me,  that's  all." 

By  now,  he  had  stopped  his  car  before  the  door.  She 
sprang  down  and  fled  up  the  path  to  the  door-step,  but 
he  followed,  only  a  pace  behind.  At  the  door,  she  turned 
and  spoke  to  him  in  the  high,  clear,  cultivated,  leisurely 
tone  which  connotes  security  and  place  and  unlimited  as 
surance.  "I'm  terribly  sorry  you  don't  think  you  can 
stop,  but  I  know  how  frightfully  late  I've  made  you, — 
already.  Good-by. ' ' 

But  her  face  made  of  that  manner  a  pitiable  travesty. 
She  was  on  the  verge  of  the  complete  demoralization  of 
panic.  She  couldn't  endure  seeing  her  husband  and  her 
daughter  in  the  same  room  with  him.  Not  to-day  at  any 
rate.  There  was  clear  hatred  of  him  in  her  eyes  but  there 
was  appeal,  as  well,  and  this  he  couldn't  resist. 

He  turned  sharply  away  and  was  getting  into  his  car 
when  John  Williamson  opened  the  door.  He  waved  one 
hand  while  he  slid  his  transmission  lever  into  first  speed 
with  the  other.  A  moment  more  and  he  was  driving  as 
fast  as  he  could  back  to  town — and  Beatrice.  He  didn't 
care  a  damn  what  John  or  any  of  the  rest  of  that  gang 
thought  of  him. 


CHAPTER  SIX 

THE   SAMARITANS 


FOE  Henry  Craven,  after  he  and  Novell!  had  put  his 
sister  and  Portia  on  the  Boston  train,  there  began  at  once 
a  life  of  guilty  pleasure.  It  was  guilty  only  in  that  it  was 
pleasurable.  He  ought  to  have  missed  Margaret,  of  course, 
suddenly  deprived  of  the  care  she'd  always  lavished  upon 
him,  and  he  was  perfectly  aware  of  this  moral  obligation. 
Margaret,  in  fact,  had  pointed  it  out — indirectly,  by  re 
ferring  to  herself  as  a  good  riddance  and  laughing  at  his 
protest  that  he  shouldn't  know  how  to  get  on  without  her. 
But,  unnatural  as  it  was  to  feel  this  way,  he  liked  being 
left  alone — "let  alone"  he  stopped  on  the  brink  of  put 
ting  it.  There  was  no  disguising  the  throb  of  elation  he 
felt  at  the  end  of  the  day's  work  with  the  realization  that 
he  needn't  go  home — nor  even  telephone  to  explain  why. 

Usually  he  did  go  home,  after  picking  up  a  bite  to  eat 
on  the  way,  but  this,  too,  was  fun  of  a  sort.  If  it  was  a 
hot  night,  he'd  undress,  leaving  his  clothes  about  just  as 
he  liked,  and  get  into  pajamas,  and  then  sit  down  at  the 
piano  and  read  a  score  (his  piano  technique  was  so  sketchy 
that  this  diversion  always  got  on  Margaret's  nerves,  when 
she  was  about  j  she  couldn  't,  either,  see  why,  if  he  felt  like 
music,  he  didn't  practise  on  his  violin,  an  instrument  he 
could  play)  or  a  detective  story  in  an  easy  chair.  He 
became  aware  of  a  lack,  somewhere,  about  this,  and 
finally  supplied  it  by  the  purchase  of  an  expensive  Eng 
lish  pipe  and  some  tobacco  Hugh  Corbett  recommended. 

221 


222         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

He  didn't  like  the  taste  of  it,  exactly,  but  the  connotative 
sensations  were  immensely  satisfactory. 

TVlien  the  bill  at  Ravinia  attracted  him  he'd  go  directly 
to  the  Park  from  down-town,  'without  bothering  to  dress, 
get  his  dinner  in  the  casino,  and  hear  just  as  much  of  the 
opera  as  he  liked,  usually  without  committing  himself  to 
a  seat  in  the  pavilion.  Sometimes  he'd  find  Mary  Wol- 
laston  (she  was  keeping  house  for  Paula  that  summer)  and 
go  for  a  stroll  with  her  about  the  lawns.  And  if,  after 
spending  the  intermission  in  pleasant  gossip  with  her,  he 
decided  he  didn  't  want  to  hear  any  more  music  that  night, 
lie  simply  took  the  next  car  back  to  town  without  an  ex 
planatory  word  to  anybody.  He  hadn't  known  an  irre 
sponsibility  like  this  since  his  father's  death,  sixteen  years 
ago — half  his  lifetime,  almost. 

One  night  the  intoxication  of  liberty  led  him  more 
widely  astray,  to  a  place  known  as  the  Blue  Moon  Garden. 
He  didn't  know  just  what  sort  of  place  it  was,  but  if  the 
respectability  of  some  of  the  persons  he  knew  to  be  its  oc 
casional  patrons  was  a  criterion,  it  couldn't  be,  exactly, 
disreputable.  He  was  sure  he'd  heard  the  Bob  Corbetts 
and  Eleanor  Randolph  speak  of  going  there.  They  were 
advertising  a  new  revue  at  the  place,  and  when  Henry 
read  James  "Wallace's  comment  in  his  paper,  to  the  effect 
that  the  music  was  less  painful  than  most  of  the  jazz  one 
heard  nowadays,  and  that,  though  sumptuously  undressed, 
the  show  was  not  vulgar  and  rather  smart,  it  surprisingly 
struck  him  that  it  would  be  fun  to  go  and  see  what  an  en 
tertainment  of  this  sort  was  like.  Even  so,  he'd  hardly 
have  overcome  a  countervailing  reluctance  if  it  had  not 
occurred  to  him  to  ask  himself  what  this  reluctance  sprang 
from.  It  was  not,  he  decided,  from  a  real  distaste.  He'd 
caught  himself  wishing  that  Joe  Greer  were  back  in  town 
from  the  North  and  would  ask  him  to  go ;  Joe,  who  knew 
the  ropes  and  would  see  him  through  if  anything  hap 
pened.  But  what  possibly  could  happen?  The  trouble 
with  him  was  that  he  was  afraid!  That  settled  the  ques 
tion,  of  course.  He'd  have  to  go. 


THE  SAMARITANS  223 

He  felt  absurd  over  his  fears  after  he  'd  got  inside.  The 
place  was  nothing  but  what  would  have  been  called  a  beer- 
garden  before  the  days  of  prohibition.  A  band  shell,  a 
dancing  floor  with  rows  of  tables  round  it  rising  in  ter 
races,  and  at  one  side  a  rudimentary  and  imperfectly  iso 
lated  stage,  a  few  scraggy  limes  surviving  the  strangu 
lation  of  the  wooden  platforms  that  had  been  built  round 
their  trunks,  and  a  wild  medley  of  colored  incandescent 
lamps  in  meaningless  festoons.  Henry  gratefully  ac 
cepted  the  head- waiter's  consignment  of  him  to  an  incon 
spicuous  table  in  a  corner  and  ordered  ginger-ale  as  the 
least  unpleasant  of  the  drinks  that  were  lawfully  left  to 
him. 

He  seriously  contemplated  walking  out  of  the  place 
again  before  the  show  began,  for  the  tone  of  the  crowd  of 
fended  him.  He  disliked  their  voices  and  their  table  man 
ners  and  especially  he  disliked  the  way  they  danced.  The 
floor  was  as  yet  only  half  filled,  but  the  couples  upon 
it,  plastered  as  tight  together  as  mutually  embracing  arms 
could  hold,  made  almost  no  lateral  motion  beyond  a  lan 
guid  circling,  and  the  stammering  drunken  rhythm  of  the 
music  expressed  itself  in  the  twitching  of  shoulders  and 
the  wrrithing  of  hips. 

This  wasn't  so  very  differentr  he  was  aware,  from  the 
way  young  people  danced  at  the  parties  Dorothy  went  to, 
but — well,  if  Dorothy  danced  like  that  she  wouldn't  do  it 
that  way.  Nothing  she  did  could  be  ugly  or  vile,  as  the 
movements,  for  example,  of  that  little  rag  of  a  girl  in 
black,  with  the  long  feather,  were  ugly  and  vile.  Did  he 
mean  to  pretend  that  well-bred  people  could  do,  without  of 
fense,  the  same  things  that  were  indecent  when  vulgar  folk 
did  them?  Yes,  he  guessed  that  was  exactly  what  he 
meant. 

It  was  an  immense  relief  to  him  when  the  noise  of  the 
jazz  players  was  stilled,  the  floor  cleared  and  the  show 
begun.  It  needed,  no  doubt,  all  the  advantage  it  got  from 
comparison  with  its  audience  to  make  it  seem  smart  and 
well-behaved,  and,  as  the  evening  advanced,  this  con- 


trast  was  less  enforced.  The  entertainment  percolated 
from  the  dance  floor,  whence  it  had  flowed  from  the 
stage,  among  the  tables,  and  during  the  long  intermis 
sions  he  recognized  performers  sitting  at  the  tables  and 
dancing  with  the  spectators. 

About  ten  o  'clock,  a  girl,  one  of  the  principal  performers 
it  appeared  from  the  way  the  music  and  the  lights  were 
employed  to  dramatize  her  entrance,  sang  a  song  upon  the 
familiar  theme  of  a  quest  for  a  lover.  The  idea  was  made 
plain  that  any  one  possessing  certain  elemental  qualifi 
cations  would  do  and  it  was  packed  with  innuendo  which 
delighted  the  audience.  After  she  had  sung  a  verse  from 
the  stage  she  moved  down  among  the  tables,  stopping  here 
and  there  to  make  her  plea  to  such  individuals  as  would 
be  most  embarrassed  by  it. 

Until  she  came  into  Henry's  neighborhood,  he  didn't 
recognize  her  at  all,  for  she  was  extravagantly  made  up  as 
the  familiar  vampire  type  and,  too,  he'd  avoided  looking 
at  her  very  closely  from  a  fear  of  attracting  her  eye.  But 
when  he  perceived  by  the  direction  of  stares  from  the 
near-by  tables  that  she  was  actually  bearing  down  upon 
him,  he  looked  up  in  desperation — and  realized  that  he 
knew  her.  She  was  one  of  the  two  girls  who  had  come 
home  from  Twitchell's  show  with  Joe  Greer;  not  the 
French  girl  he'd  liked  so  well,  but  the  other  one.  What 
was  her  name?  Bunny — something. 

In  the  same  instant  she  recognized  him  and  relinquished 
her  intention,  transfixing,  in  his  stead,  a  victim  at  the 
next  table.  But  he  was  sure  that  as  she  passed,  close 
enough  to  brush  his  sleeve,  she'd  spoken  to  him,  to  the 
effect,  he  thought,  that  she'd  see  him  later.  He  found 
her  name  in  his  program  and  made  sure  he  'd  not  been  mis 
taken.  Yes,  there  it  was  in  big  black  letters,  Bunny  Bar 
rett. 

Certainly  he  wouldn't  go  and  look  her  up  at  the  end  of 
the  performance  if  this  was  what  she  'd  meant — but  was  it  ? 
Wouldn't  it  be  more  sensible  to  slip  away  at  once?  He'd 
had  enough  of  this,  hadn't  he?  Yes,  of  course.  All  the 


THE  SAMARITANS  225 

same  he  didn't  go.  Probably  she'd  meant  nothing  at  all 
by  that  aside  of  hers,  if,  indeed,  he  hadn't  mistaken  her, 
altogether. 

So  he  was  still  sitting  there,  a  bit  uneasy  but  myste 
riously  excited,  when,  early  in  the  next  intermission,  he 
saw  her  coming  toward  him  again,  decorously  cloaked,  now, 
in  a  light  evening  wrap  and  with  some  of  the  more  fla 
grant  items  of  her  make-up  removed,  but  unmistakable, 
nevertheless,  to  the  occupants  of  the  tables,  who  stared 
after  her  with  open  curiosity.  It  was  too  late  then,  of 
course,  for  Henry  to  do  anything  but  get  up  and  shake 
hands  and  ask  her  to  sit  down  with  him.  Fortified  by  his 
program  he  was  able  to  address  her  as  Miss  Barrett. 

The  officious  proximity  of  a  waiter  suggested  an  offer 
of  refreshment,  which  he,  a  little  hesitantly,  made.  "I 
come  on  again,"  she  said,  "so  I  haven't  time  to  eat  any 
thing,  but  I  would  like  a  glass  of  Munich  beer."  He 
thought  this  was  facetious  and  began,  "So  would  I  .  .  .  " 
when  he  perceived  she'd  said  it  seriously.  "You  can  get 
anything  if  they  know  you,"  she  assured  him,  and,  turn 
ing,  informed  the  waiter  that  he  was  all  right.  "Abso 
lutely!"  So  Henry,  feeling  superbly  wicked,  said  he'd 
take  Munich  beer,  too.  A  half  litre  for  each  of  them. 

Conversation  with  Bunny  didn't  flow  freely,  even  under 
the  liquefactive  influence  of  the  beer.  She  asked  about 
Joe  and  learned  he  was  out-of-town.  She  revived  memo 
ries  of  their  party  and  regretted  that  the  real  one,  to  which 
he  was  to  have  brought  his  violin,  hadn  't  come  off.  Henry 
made  what  he  could  of  these  infertile  topics  but  it  was  not 
much,  and  he  had  no  others  to  launch  in  place  of  them. 
Yet,  preposterously,  he  was  enjoying  the  adventure.  He 
basked  in  the  respectful  envy  of  the  tables  round  about, 
in  his  status  as  a  trustworthy  lawbreaker,  established  by 
Bunny's  guarantee,  with  the  waiter.  She'd  transfigured 
him — this  was  what,  in  a  word,  it  came  to — into  a  per 
sonage  ! 

But  before  she  left  him  his  complacence  was  destined  to 
collapse.  He  was  looking  out  over  the  dance  floor  hope- 


226         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

ful  of  seeing  something  -which  might  be  made  to  serve  as 
conversational  grist,  when  his  glance  fell  upon  Joe 's  daugh 
ter,  Beatrice.  Evidently  she  had  just  come  in,  for  the 
head-waiter  was  conducting  her  and  her  companion  to  a 
reserved  table.  Henry  knew  him,  too.  He  was  young 
Lansing  Ware.  Their  progress  attracted  a  good  deal  of 
attention,  the  girl's  prettiness,  her  swagger  and  her  con 
spicuous  dress  (it  was  an  evening  frock  of  rose  or  straw 
berry  color,  matched,  more  or  less,  in  stockings,  slippers 
and  an  explosive  hat)  making  this  inevitable.  Henry  was 
disconcerted,  on  turning  back  to  Bunny,  to  find  her  watch 
ing  them  with  an  interest  evidently  as  personal  as  his. 

"Quite  some  baby,  Lance  has  pronged  out  to-night!" 
she  observed,  adding  with  a  sniff,  " — And  then  people 
talk  about  actresses!"     She  seemed  quite  sure  that  Bea 
trice  did  not  belong  to  her  profession. 
"Do  you  know  him?"  he  asked. 

Bunny  nodded.  "He's  a  cold  storage  egg,  all  right," 
she  said.  Her  tone  was  as  derogatory  as  the  unusual 
epithet  she  had  applied  to  him,  but  it  struck  Henry,  from 
the  way  she  changed  her  position  and  kept  looking  at  the 
egg,  that  she'd  be  glad  to  attract  his  attention.  The 
table  they'd  taken  wasn't  far  away  and  she  might  easily 
manage  it. 

The  mere  glimpse  of  the  corollary  possibility,  that  Bea 
trice  and  young  "Ware  would  see  him,  in  his  present  com 
pany,  reduced  him  to  a  state  of  acute  embarrassment.  He 
was  ashamed  of  the  feeling  but  this  didn  't  help  him  to  over 
come  it.  He  sat  as  small  as  he  could  and  fixed  his  eyes 
upon  the  food-stained  bill  of  fare  upon  the  table.  Another 
dance  began  presently  and  he  was  able  to  dismiss,  for  the 
moment,  his  fears  (though  not  his  disgust  with  himself 
for  having  entertained  them)  by  observing  that  the  other 
couple  had  merged  themselves  into  the  milling  mass  of 
dancers  upon  the  floor.  Also,  it  appeared,  this  dance 
was  Bunny's  call  to  quarters. 

She  said  as  she  took  leave  of  him  that  she'd  be  free 
again  a  little  after  eleven,  but  he  assured  her  that  he  was 


THE  SAMARITANS  227 

leaving  almost  at  once.  It  was  terribly  nice  of  her  to  have 
remembered  him,  and  he  hoped  that  they  might  meet  again 
some  time.  "The  head-waiter  11  send  a  note  back  any 
time  you  come,"  she  told  him,  and  upon  his  fervid  promise 
to  write  such  a  note — the  next  time  he  came  back  to  the 
Blue  Moon — she  left  him.  She  was  a  nice,  friendly,  hard 
working  girl  and  he  was  a  pitiful  snob  to  have  been 
ashamed  of  her  merely  because  two  people  he  knew  hap 
pened  to  come  into  the  garden,  but  bootless  contrition 
wasn't  the  thing  the  moment  called  for.  He  must  make 
Tip  his  mind  what  to  do  about  Beatrice. 

Lansing  "Ware  was,  unless  the  gossip  of  his  own  circle 
did  him  grave  injustice,  a  pretty  bad  lot.  Bunny's  simile 
had  really  been  charitable.  He'd  been  court-martialed  for 
drunkenness,  Henry  had  been  told,  and  his  limp  was  not 
an  honorable  wound,  but  the  result  of  a  joy-riding  es 
capade  of  an  unusually  discreditable  sort.  The  real  in 
dictment  against  him,  however,  seemed  to  be  that  he  elab 
orated  and  encouraged  the  myth  among  all  persons  to 
whom  the  truth  could  not  be  told,  beginning  with  his  de 
voted  mother  and  sister,  that  he'd  been  disabled  in  the 
strikingly  courageous  performance  of  duty.  It  was  not 
a  disability  that  interfered  with  any  of  his  pleasures,  so 
far  as  one  could  see.  He  might  not  have  been  able  to 
dance  the  waltz  of  Henry's  day,  but  at  what  they  called 
dancing  here,  to-night,  he  seemed  adept. 

Henry's  impulse,  as  soon  as  Bunny's  departure  set  him 
at  liberty,  was  to  attach  himself  to  the  couple,  if  only  as  a 
barnacle,  discourage  young  "Ware,  if  possible  amuse  Bea 
trice,  and  eventir.iiy  take  her  home.  But  it  wasn't  his 
way,  after  all  those  years  of  Margaret's  training,  to  do 
anything  impulsively,  even  when  his  inclination  was  clear 
• — and  in  this  case  it  was  not. 

He  liked  the  girl,  a  little,  and  what  he  didn't  like  about 
her  he  whole-heartedly  pitied.  Yet  he  was  aware  that  his 
pity  would  be  resented  and  the  grounds  for  it  inexplicable 
to  her.  He  had  thought  he  found  in  her,  at  the  begin 
ning  of  their  acquaintance,  the  germ  of  a  genuine  liking 


228         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

for  him,  an  evanescent  lighting  up  and  opening  out  to  him 
which  wasn't  at  all  a  matter  of  consciously  presented  ap 
pearances; — but  very  likely  he'd  been  mistaken  in  this. 

Margaret  thought  so,  anyhow.  She'd  cut  him  short 
with  a  satirical  smile,  during  his  only  talk  with  her  upon 
the  subject,  and  had  told  him  bluntly  that  the  girl  was 
only — to  use  her  own  vocabulary — stringing  him.  "She 
was  smiling  over  your  shoulder  at  her  father  whenever  she 
got  a  chance. — And  I  understand  she  boasted  of  you  as  a 
conquest,  to  Dorothy."  Margaret  took  some  of  the  sting 
out  of  this  by  adding  the  general  truth  that  any  girl  of 
that  age  could  make  a  fool  of  any  man  over  thirty-five. 

She  was  probably  right,  even  in  this  special  case. 
Women  were  a  lot  less  credulous  than  men; — saw  things 
clearer.  And  he'd  felt,  for  himself,  about  some  of  Bea 
trice  's  professions  and  approaches,  a  naive  coquetry.  Any 
how  he  was  pretty  sure  that  if  he  attached  himself  to  her 
to-night  he'd  be  received,  not  as  a  friend  but  as  a  rival  of 
Lansing  Ware,  who  would  be  made,  perhaps,  the  recip 
ient  of  surreptitious  smiling  glances  of  commiseration.  It 
would  be  a  thoroughly  unpleasant  position — as  that  of  an 
ineffectual  altruist  usually  was. 

It  was  the  ineffectuality  rather  than  the  unpleasantness 
that  held  him  back.  He  didn't  dance,  these  days.  (His 
hatred  of  the  new  rhythms  was  too  intense  even  for  Mar 
garet  to  overcome.)  All  he  could  do  would  be  to  sit  at 
their  table  and  trust  their  charity  to  bring  them  back  to 
it.  He  thought,  too  late,  of  an  audacious  strategic  re 
source  he'd  thrown  away, — Bunny!  With  her  enlisted 
help,  he  might  have  accomplished  something.  But  he  ac 
knowledged,  with  disgust,  that  his  courage  wouldn't  have 
been  equal  to  this,  even  if  he'd  thought  of  it  in  time,  and 
in  this  reaction  he  unobtrusively  left  the  garden  and  went 
home  to  bed. 

Very  likely  this  mountain  he  'd  been  making  was  nothing 
but  a  molehill,  after  all.  Young  girls  of  unimpeachable 
social  position  did  frequent  places  of  this  sort,  or  worse,  if 
one  believed  the  gossip,  in  no  more  protective  company 


THE  SAMARITANS  229 

than  that  of  boys  of  their  own  years  and  class.  They  de 
serted  respectable  dinners  and  dances  their  parents  had 
consigned  them  to,  and  adventured  abroad,  in  the  small 
hours,  carrying  their  liquor  with  them.  Yet  Henry  be 
lieved  they  emerged  from  this  phase  of  quasi-libertinage, 
shabby  as  it  was,  more  or  less  intact.  Then  why  worry 
about  Beatrice  ? 

Well,  Beatrice's  social  position  wasn't  unimpeachable. 
She  hadn't  the  protection  of  the  pale.  During  these 
weeks  of  her  father's  absence,  she  lacked  even  the  protec 
tion  of  a  home.  She  was  mistress  of  a  flat — an  atrocious 
position  for  a  girl  to  have  been  abandoned  in.  Henry 
wondered  why  Joe  had  done  it.  He  had  never  under 
stood  why  the  plan  for  sending  her  east  with  Margaret 
had  so  suddenly  been  dropped. 

Margaret,  he  was  aware,  had  been  deeply  offended  by 
the  change,  and  he  suspected,  from  an  enigmatic  phrase  or 
two  she'd  used,  that  Joe  was  not  the  sole  object  of  her 
anger ;  but  she  had  repulsed  so  fiercely  his  own  innocently 
meant  questions,  that  he'd  been  glad  to  let  the  subject 
alone.  There  was  no  doubt,  however,  that  she'd  washed 
her  hands  of  both  the  Greers  before  she  went  away.  She  'd 
been,  indeed,  unusually — explicit  about  it.  It  had  been 
on  this  occasion  that  she'd  spoken  her  mind  to  her  brother 
about  the  nature  of  Beatrice's  regard  for  him. 

It  was  painfully  clear  to  Henry  that  she'd  be  annoyed 
to  be  told — and  of  course  he'd  have  to  tell  her — that  he 
had  attempted  anything  in  the  nature  of  a  rescue. — Of 
Dulcinea  del  Toboso!  That  would  be  Margaret's  view  of 
it,  and  with,  he  couldn't  deny,  a  certain  justification.  He 
would  feel  foolish,  paraded  in  the  guise  of  captive  at  the 
chariot-tail  of  the  young  thing  he'd  seen  to-night  in  Lan 
sing  Ware 's  embrace !  Yet  something  had  got  to  be  done 
about  it. 

A  telephoned  reminder  from  Violet  that  he  hadn't  been 
near  them  since  Margaret  went  away  and  a  specific  invi 
tation  to  come  up  to  an  early  dinner  and  go  to  the  Park 
afterward  to  hear  Fournier  sing  in  Thais,  showed  him,  he 


230 

thought,  a  way  to  making  a  truce  with  his  conscience. 
Violet  was  the  person,  of  course,  to  give  Beatrice  the  tact 
ful  looking-after  she  needed.  She'd  quite  made  friends 
with  Joe.  There  was,  in  the  back  of  his  head,  a  faint 
surmise  that  some  suggestion  of  hers,  inadvertent,  no 
doubt,  was  responsible  for  Joe's  having  given  up  his  idea 
of  sending  Beatrice  east  for  the  summer.  She  might 
easily  enough  have  said,  without  meaning  as  much  as  he'd 
supposed,  that  she'd  keep  a  friendly  eye  on  the  girl.  The 
simplest  way  to  fulfill  the  promise  would  be  for  Violet  to 
invite  her  to  stay  with  them  until  her  father's  return. 

He  found  everything  auspicious,  beyond  his  hopes,  for 
the  unfolding  of  this  project.  Another  pair  of  guests 
hadn't  been  able  to  come,  Dodo  was  off  somewhere,  so 
the  bare  three  of  them,  Violet  and  John  and  Henry,  sat 
down  to  dine  together.  She  struck  him,  too,  as  unusually 
amiable,  to-night,  affectionate  with  him  as  she'd  only  rarely 
been  since  the  distant  days — among  the  Chateaux — of  their 
youthful  romance. 

She  kept  the  reins  of  the  talk,  though,  in  her  own  hands. 
She  was  full  of  enthusiasm  over  the  summer  opera,  the 
amazingly  high  quality  of  the  performances,  the  fun  it  all 
was.  She'd  been  going  quite  a  lot  to  rehearsals,  lately. 
You  never  really  understood  an  opera  until  you'd  heard 
it  rehearsed.  "What  did  Henry  think  of  Fournier  ?  What 
had  he  heard  him  in?  "Wasn't  he  the  greatest  of  all  the 
modern  acting  barytones?  Oh,  Baklanoff  was  great,  of 
course — but  this  man  was  so  delightful,  personally.  He'd 
been  playing  round  with  them  quite  a  lot,  lately.  He  loved 
shooting  over  the  traps  with  John  and  was  awfully  good 
at  it,  which  you  wouldn't  expect,  somehow,  of  an  artist 
like  that.  But  it  seemed  he'd  done  it  for  years  at  Monte 
Carlo,  using  live  birds,  of  course. 

The  theme  showed  no  signs  of  exhausting  itself  as  the 
dinner  progressed  so  Henry,  at  last,  to  forestall  her  leav 
ing  him  with  John  to  their  cigars,  plunged  into  his  story 
from  a  standing  start.  He'd  had  a  rather  uncomfortable 
experience,  he  said,  and  he  wanted  to  "tell  them  about  it — 


THE  SAMARITANS  231 

particularly  Violet.  He  threw  that  in  because  he  fancied 
from  a  restless  movement  of  hers  that  she  contemplated 
leaving  them,  anyhow.  He  brightened  up  his  beginning  as 
best  he  could  by  stressing  his  unfamiliarity  with  the  role 
of  dissolute  bachelor,  which  had  led  him  to  visit  a  place 
like  the  Blue  Moon.  He  told  them,  upon  the  same  tack, 
about  Bunny,  explaining,  though  pretty  concisely,  the  cir 
cumstances  in  which  he'd  formerly  met  her;  and  he  felt, 
at  once,  through  his  skin,  that  this  had  been  a  mistake. 
It  was  too  late  to  help  that  now,  though,  so  he  went 
straight  on  to  the  heart  of  the  business. 

"Well,  that's  the  sort  of  place  it  is.  I  suppose  you 
know  all  about  it.  Anyhow  it  was  a  great  shock  to  me  to 
see  young  Beatrice  Greer  there.  Lansing  Ware  brought 
her  in,  just  as  I  was  on  the  point  of  leaving." 

He  elected  to  look  up  at  John,  at  that,  instead  of  at  Vio 
let.  She  had  said  nothing,  nor  moved,  so  far  as  he  was 
aware,  but  he  knew  that,  for  some  reason,  his  mission 
wasn't  prospering.  John  mysteriously  confirmed  this  by 
looking  fixedly  at  him,  lowering  his  off-eyelid — the  one 
Violet  couldn't  see,  and  almost  perceptibly  shaking  his 
head — a  plain  warning  that  Henry  was  on  thin  ice.  How 
ever,  you  aren't  lifted  off  it  by  the  mere  knowledge  that 
it's  thin. 

"Oh,  I  suppose  any  one  might  go  there,"  he  hurried  on; 
"even  Dorothy,  for  a  lark,  with  the  right  sort  of  crowd. 
But  a  girl  like  Beatrice,  who  hasn't  yet  had  a  chance  to 
learn  her  way  about,  going  alone  to  a  resort  like  that  with 
a  rotter  like  young  Ware,  is  in — well,  real  danger,  it 
seems  to  me.  And  since  you're  on  friendly  terms  with 
Joe  ..." 

He  forced  himself,  at  this  point,  to  look  round  at  Vio 
let,  by  way  of  driving  it  home  to  her  that  he'd  used  the 
pronoun  in  the  singular  personal  sense,  and  the  sight  of 
her  face  stopped  him  short.  It  was  ablaze  with  anger. 
She  gave  an  ugly  laugh  and  contemptuously  repeated  his 
word. 

"Danger!     She's    past    that,    I    guess.     Her    father's 


232         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

daughter — if  that's  what  she  is!  He  was  in  the  habit  of 
taking  his  girls  home  with  him,  wasn't  he?  "Well,  that's 
probably  what  she's  doing,  now  she's  been  given  the 
chance,  with  Lansing  Ware — and  so  on." 

Henry,  frozen  speechless,  was  a  little  relieved  to  see  that 
John  was  gathering  himself  up  for  a  protest.  Evidently, 
though,  Violet  perceived  the  same  thing.  Springing  up 
and  thrusting  back  her  chair,  she  forestalled  him.  "It's 
his  own  fault,"  she  told  her  husband  sharply;  " — men 
tioning  Dodo  in  the  same  breath  with  a — thing  like  that ! ' ' 
Then  she  turned  on  Henry.  "I  won't  have  that  man 
spoken  of,  so  you  may  as  well  make  up  your  mind  to  it. 
He  isn't  speakable.  He's  been  bragging  to  yon,  I  sup 
pose,  of  the — 'friendly  terms'  he's  on  with  me." 

It  was  not,  in  form,  a  question — Henry  had  neither 
voice  nor  wits  to  have  dealt  with  it  if  it  had  been — but 
he  got  the  impression  that  she  awaited,  breathless  for  a 
moment,  an  answer.  "When  she  saw  he  meant  to  make 
none,  the  tension  slackened  and  she  gave  him  a  dry  little 
smile.  "You're  the  one  John  and  I  are  worrying  about," 
she  said,  and  with  a  nod  and  a  matter-of-fact  admoni 
tion  not  to  smoke  too  long,  as  they  didn't  want  to  be 
late  for  the  first  act,  she  left  them. 

"It'll  be  'business  as  usual'  with  Greer,  from  now  on," 
John  explained,  at  the  end  of  a  long  thick  silence,  punc 
tuated  by  a  sigh  and  a  heart-felt  damn  or  two,  "but  as  a 
social  account  he's  written  off  the  books.  And  the  girl, 
too,  of  course.  Sort  of  a  pity,  because  she  isn't  so  bad, 
but  there's  nothing  else  to  do." 

"Something  happened,  I  suppose,"  Henry  ventured 
weakly. 

John  nodded.  "I  don't  know  what,  exactly.  Violet 
swears  it  was  nothing — that  had  to  be  taken  up,  you  know. 
"Why,  we  were  all  driving  back  from  Hickory  Hill — oh, 
a  couple  of  weeks  ago,  this  was,  the  day  we  had  that 
cloud-burst — and  I'd  put  her  in  with  him.  I  was  driving 
Dodo  in  the  little  roadster.  "When  they  came  up  with  us, 
at  the  house  we'd  taken  shelter  in,  she  left  him  and  fin- 


THE  SAMARITANS  233 

ished  the  drive  with  Dodo  and  me.  Tried  to  make  out 
it  was  nothing  but  that  she  didn't  want  to  take  him  so 
far  out  of  his  way.  But  I  could  see  she'd  been  badly 
shaken  up.  Some  rotten  thing  he'd  said  to  her,  I  sup 
pose.  Of  course  she  doesn  't  want  a  mess  made  of  it,  so  the 
only  thing  to  do  is  to  let  it  alone.  I  could  kick  myself  for 
having  given  him  a  chance  even  to  look  at  her,  because, 
of  course,  I  knew  he  was  a  damned  mucker,  from  the  first. 
But  he  seemed  to  act  all  right,  at  the  start.  I  almost 
liked  him  that  day  we  went  to  Hickory  Hill.  And  all  the 
while,  I  suppose,  he  was  just  waiting  for  his  chance." 

It  was  fortunate,  Henry  felt,  for  him,  that  John  wasn't 
watching  him  very  closely,  and  that  his  responsive 
indignation  over  the  story  of  Joe's  misbehavior 
was  taken  so  confidently  for  granted.  He  stubbornly 
— and  to  himself,  surprisingly — disbelieved  that  Joe  had 
been  waiting  for  his  chance  or  that  he'd  made  an  un 
warranted  use  of  it.  The  thing  that  stood  out  in  his  mind 
was  Violet's  look  while  she  waited  to  learn  whether  Joe 
had  told  him  his  version  of  the  episode  and  her  evident 
relief  when  she  came  to  the  conclusion  that  he  had  not. 
Henry  had  been  observing  her  for  many  years  with  a 
pretty  well  disillusioned  eye,  and  he  had  memories  of  his 
own  which  served  as  interpreters.  Violet  might  have  got 
more  than  she  bargained  for,  but  she  had  not  been  the 
victim  of  an  unprovoked  assault.  And  if  there 'd  been 
anything  she  could  tell  John,  she'd  have  told  it. — But 
these  reflections  were  clearly  not  presentable  to  John  "Will 
iamson.  It  was  hardly  prudent  even  to  entertain  them 
in  his  presence. 

"You  said  something  about  business  as  usual,"  Henry 
reminded  him.  "I  suppose  that  applies  to  me." 

John  assured  him  that  it  did.  He  added,  rather  more 
thoughtfully,  "And  even  on  the  personal  side,  as  far  as 
you're  concerned,  I  wouldn't  make  any  difference,  if  I 
were  you — for  the  present.  We  can't  possibly  get  rid  of 
him  for  another  year,  and  there's  no  good  stirring  him  up, 
unnecessarily,  or  making  him  suspicious.  In  some  ways, 


234         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

the  better  he  likes  you,  the — simpler  the  situation  will  be. 
You've  done  well  with  him,  so  far.  Better  than  I  thought 
you  could.  Well,  keep  it  up.  Don't  worry  about  Vio 
let.  I'll  square  you  with  her. — It's  damned  unlucky,  on 
that  side,  that  this  thing  had  to  break  the  way  it  did.  No 
help  for  it,  of  course. — I  don 't  suppose  there 's  any  chance, 
even  now,  of  getting  Margaret  to  take  the  girl  ? ' ' 

"I'm  afraid  that  can't  be  managed,"  Henry  said, 
more  decisively  than  he  often  spoke. 

John,  though,  seemed  quite  unaware  of  this,  and  went 
on,  comfortably,  "Oh,  well,  do  the  best  you  can  to  keep 
him  on  the  rails.  That's  really  important,  you  know." 

Anger  was  a  rare  and  slowly  roused  emotion  with 
Henry,  but  it  burned  in  him  like  a  fever,  as  he  sat  in 
Violet's  box  that  evening,  pretending  to  listen  to  the  in 
anities  of  Thais,  so  hot  that  he  wondered  they  didn't  ask 
what  was  the  matter  with  him.  Complacently,  they  saw 
nothing.  Violet  was  absorbed  in  her  new  pet,  the  bary 
tone,  Fournier— a  safer  sort,  for  the  role  of  tame  cat  she 
evidently  thought  him,  than  Joe  had  turned  out  to  be. 
And  John — what  was  the  matter  of  his  contented  contem 
plations?  His  patent  importance;  his  possessions — in 
cluding  the  most  highly  valued  of  them,  his  pretty  wife; 
his  profits,  past  and  future — including  those  he  meant  to 
make  out  of  Joe  Greer  's  genius,  before  he  got  rid  of  him  ? 

John  was  the  unconscious  object  of  the  hottest  of  Hen 
ry's  wrath.  The  hardly  veiled  implications  in  that  talk 
of  theirs,  burned  under  his  skin  like  a  corrosive.  He  un 
derstood,  now,  the  true  nature  of  the  job  John  had  so 
benevolently  offered  him  last  April.  A  spy,  expected  to 
insinuate  his  way  into  the  confidence  of  a  business  asso 
ciate,  quiet  his  suspicions,  ' '  keep  him  on  the  rails, ' '  against 
the  day  of  his  precalculated  destruction.  Well,  Henry 
would  see  them  damned  first,  and  he'd  go  to  John,  upon 
a  fitting  occasion — naturally  not  here  in  the  box,  to-night, 
— and  tell  him  so. 

At  the  intermission  he  pleaded  a  headache,  which  some 
thing  about  his  looks  seemed  to  make  plausible  to  Violet, 


THE  SAMARITANS  235 

and  took  the  next  trolley  back  to  town ;  but  the  change  of 
scene  did  not  effect  a  recession  of  his  anger.  It  kept  him 
half  awake  till  dawn,  like  a  recurrent  nightmare. 

He'd  have  to  resign  his  job  with  the  flax  company.  It 
was  not,  under  his  present  instructions,  the  sort  of  job  a 
man  with  any  self-respect  could  hold.  Not  if  he'd  under 
stood  those  instructions  aright.  Well,  there  couldn't  be 
any  serious  doubt — could  there? — that  he  had.  He'd  say 
that  to  John  in  so  many  words.  They  could  find  some  one 
else,  no  doubt.  He'd  go  back  to  his  old  job  in  the  bank. 
But  would  they  take  him  back?  No,  they  wouldn't.  The 
ranks,  there,  had  closed  up  behind  him. 

He  realized  with  a  sensation  of  spiritual  nausea,  that  a 
quarrel  to  the  finish  with  John  was,  simply,  not  open  to 
him.  Not  with  Margaret  .  .  .  No,  it  wasn't  Margaret. 
He  couldn't  hide  behind  her.  She'd  be  looked  after,  no 
doubt,  kept  safely  on  the  hither  side  of  actual  privation, 
anyhow,  no  matter  what  he  did.  But  there  'd  be  no  mercy 
shown  him,  once  he  had  openly  presented  himself  to 
John  in  the  colors  of  an  ingrate  and  renegade.  Life,  in  the 
limbo  John  and  his  friends  could  consign  him  to,  was  a 
thing  he  couldn't  face. 

In  the  morning,  though,  after  he'd  shaved  and  had  his 
breakfast,  he  was  able  to  take  a  less  cheerless,  as  well  as 
a  less  drastic,  view  of  the  situation.  He  couldn't  be  con 
sidered  a  spy  upon  Joe,  because  his  position  was  openly 
acknowledged.  He  was  there  to  protect  the  legitimate 
interests  of  a  certain  group  of  stock-holders,  and  there  was 
no  reason  why  he  should  not  go  on  protecting  them.  His 
personal  sentiments  toward  Joe  were  irrelevant.  There 
was  no  need  of  insisting  to  John  that  his  friendship  for 
the  man  was  genuine  and  not  simulated.  John's  assump 
tion  that  it  was  simulated  was  really,  though  unpalatable, 
about  the  best  lubricant  the  situation  could  have.  He  had, 
for  example,  given  a  carte  blanche  which  fully  licensed 
Henry's  new-born  project  for  constituting  himself  an 
uncle  to  Beatrice. 

But  at  the  end  of  a  fortnight  in  the  course  of  which  he 


236         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

had  made  four  or  five  attempts  to  get  himself  established 
in  the  girl's  mind  as  a  friendly  anchorage,  he  confessed 
himself  defeated.  Jennie  MacArthur  was  the  person  to 
whom  the  confession  was  made. 

2 

Until  both  Joe  and  Margaret  went  away,  Henry  had 
made  little  conscious  progress  toward  a  friendship  with 
the  infallible  secretary.  From  the  first  they'd  got  on 
well  enough.  He  had  not,  as  he'd  expected,  found  her 
superhuman  efficiency  irritating,  nor  himself  put  upon 
the  defensive  by  it.  After  the  first  two  or  three  days  of 
routine  work  in  the  office,  he  blushed  whenever  he  recalled 
his  injurious  suspicion,  entertained  on  the  day  of  the  di 
rectors'  meeting,  that  there  might  be  a  sexual  liaison  be 
tween  her  and  Joe.  By  the  end  of  the  first  week  he  had 
forgotten  that  he'd  ever  entertained  it.  He  found  she'd 
meant  literally  her  invitation  to  call  on  her  any  time  for 
anything  in  the  wThole  range  of  the  activities  of  the  new  and 
rather  chaotic  business,  and  his  dependence  upon  her  was 
a  little  humiliating  until,  along  in  June,  she  was  out  a 
fortnight  with  an  attack  of  flu,  and  he  found  that  every 
one  else  missed  her  just  as  he  did.  But  that  she  had  any 
existence  out  of  office  hours  hadn't  occurred  to  him. 

In  the  office,  however,  it  wasn't  all  business — a  dis 
covery  which  had  delighted  Henry  after  his  long  years  of 
habituation  to  the  cold  inelastic  routine  of  the  bank.  This 
atmosphere,  by  contrast,  seemed  almost  frivolous.  Work 
always  got  done,  to  be  sure,  but  there  was  no  prescribed 
manner,  no  look  of  solemn  preoccupied  importance  to  be 
maintained,  and  if  there  was  nothing  to  do,  you  did  noth 
ing,  openly  and  unabashed.  Oftener  than  not  it  happened 
during  some  chink  in  the  day  that  Henry  would  find  him 
self  with  Miss  MacArthur  and  Joe,  sitting  in  one  of  their 
offices  very  much  at  ease,  chatting  about  amusing  matters 
that  had  nothing  remotely  to  do  with  the  flax  business  or 
any  other. 

Joe   was    chiefly   responsible    for   these    recesses   and, 


THE  SAMARITANS  237 

naturally,  was  the  focus  of  them,  talking  most  of  the  time 
himself,  but  Jennie  contributed  something  indispensable 
to  them,  a  sort  of  warm  luminous  atmosphere  like  the  aura 
her  hair  made  when  you  saw  her  against  the  light.  This 
same  gracious  atmosphere  enveloped  Henry's  momentary 
encounters  with  her  in  the  course  of  the  day 's  work. 

It  was  nothing  she  consciously  generated,  nor  that  Henry 
was  specifically  aware  of,  but  when  it  occurred  to  him, 
one  day,  that  not  once  since  he  had  stepped  into  this  new 
birth  had  his  old  hounding  fear  of  losing  his  job  assailed 
him,  he  decided  that  Jennie  had  had  a  lot  to  do  with  this 
immunity; — more,  even,  than  Joe.  She  could  so  easily 
have  made  him  feel  useless  and  inept,  especially  if  she'd 
set  out  to  be  helpful  and  encouraging. 

Joe's  absence  in  the  North  threw  them,  of  course,  into 
a  much  closer  association  than  there 'd  been  any  need  of 
before,  and  revealed,  to  Henry,  unsuspected  qualities  in 
her.  Her  suppleness  and  her  abundance  in  resource  he'd 
always  perceived,  but  he  found  in  her  now  a  penetration, 
an  ability  to  think  through,  with  which  he'd  never  credited 
her. 

He  thought  about  her  a  lot,  even  during  his  leisurely 
meditations  away  from  the  office,  but  even  so  it  was  as  a 
detached  phenomenon  which  materialized  when  she  left  her 
little  car  over  in  Grant  Park  in  the  morning  and  demate- 
rialized  again  when  she  went  to  get  it  at  night.  When, 
with  the  wearing  off  of  the  novelty  of  doing  without  Mar 
garet,  he  began  casting  about  for  companions  for  occa 
sional  evenings,  Jennie  presented  herself  at  first  to  his 
mind  as  a  pleasant  but,  somehow,  fanciful  possibility;  he 
played  for  several  days  with  the  notion  of  inviting  her  out 
to  dinner  or  to  a  show  without  getting  any  nearer  to  the 
point  of  doing  it.  It  might,  he  feared,  strike  her  as  a  little 
absurd. 

But  when,  in  his  deepening  perplexity  about  Beatrice, 
he  thought  of  Jennie  as  a  helpful  counselor,  he  seized  upon 
this  as  an  excuse,  walked  straight  into  her  office  with  it, 
and  asked  her  if  she'd  dine  with  him  that  night;  " — or 


238         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

any  night  within  the  next  few  days  when  you  happen  to 
be  free.  There 's  something  I  'd  like  to  talk  over  with  you, ' ' 
he  added  a  little  hurriedly,  "and  the  office  doesn't  strike 
me  as  just  the  place  for  it." 

She  did  smile,  in  open  amusement,  over  his  explanation, 
but  her  comment  saved  him  from  feeling  that  he'd  been 
laughed  at,  "That's  like  Joe,"  she  said.  "Yes,  I'll  be 
glad  to  come.  To-night's  all  right,  for  me."  She  asked, 
after  he'd  brought  up  the  question  of  the  hour  and  the 
place,  "Is  it  anything  about  the  business?" 

He  felt  a  little  apologetic  about  admitting  it  was  not, 
but  her  explanation  disposed  of  this  misgiving  at  once. 

"If  it  isn't  about  the  business,  I'd  like  to  go  home  and 
'dress,  first.  So  it  won't  be  quite  so  much  a  business 
•woman 's  advice  you  '11  get. — That 's  what  I  say, ' '  she  added, 
"but  I  suppose  the  real  reason  is  that  I  like  an  excuse  for 
pretending  it's  a  party." 

"It  is  a  party,  really,"  he  confessed.  "The  advice  was 
my  excuse.  I  felt  I  needed  one,  somehow."  So  they  de 
cided  amicably  upon  the  Blackstone  at  seven  o'clock. 
Henry  went  home  and  dressed,  too, — a  thing  he  hadn't 
done  since  Margaret  went  away. 

He  had  been  looking  at  her  long  enough,  after  he  came 
into  the  hotel  lobby,  to  think  what  a  charming-looking 
woman  that  was  and  how  well  she  was  dressed  before  he 
knew  her  for  Jennie  at  all;  indeed,  if  she  hadn't  nodded 
and  risen  to  meet  him  just  when  she  did,  he  might  have 
turned  his  gaze  away  and  gone  on  writh  his  search  for 
her.  The  costume  she'd  put  on  to  "make  it  feel  like  a 
party"  was  just  the  simple  sort  of  thing  appropriate  to 
the  warm  night  and  the  occasion  they'd  planned,  but, 
bringing  out,  as  it  did,  a  feminine  aspect  of  her  he'd  never 
surmised,  it  amounted  almost  to  a  metamorphosis.  It 
seemed  queer  to  hear  this  stranger  speak  in  Jennie 's  forth 
right  full-throated  voice. 

"I  know  musicians  hate  eating  to  music,"  she  said, 
•when  the  question  of  the  choice  of  dining-rooms  came  up, 
"so  we'll  go  into  the  small  one,  where  there  isn't  any." 


THE  SAMARITANS  239 

He  acquiesced  in  the  choice  she  had  made  for  him,  though 
he  suspected  it  was  not  her  own,  and  thanked  her  for  it 
after  they  were  seated  at  a  snug  little  table  by  an  open 
window.  "I  don't  think  I've  ever  had  that  preference 
recognized  before,"  he  said.  "Most  of  my  friends  re 
fuse  to  believe,  even  when  I  tell  them,  that  I  hate  all 
restaurant  orchestras; — the  better,  the  worse — since  I 
pretend  to  be  musical. — I  wonder  if  you'd  mind  telling  me 
how  you  knew." 

"One  of  my  oldest  friends  is  a  musician,"  she  told  him, 
"Anthony  March.  I  guess  you've  heard  of  him." 

Indeed  Henry  had!  From  Paula  YVollaston  and  others 
of  her  circle,  he'd  been  hearing  of  very  little  else,  for 
months.  He'd  heard  some  of  his  music,  too.  Paula  had 
sung  a  cycle  of  Whitman  songs  of  his,  one  night  last  spring. 
Amazing  stuff,  it  was.  He  was  greatly  interested  (he 
hoped  he  was  concealing  the  fact  that  he  was  also  aston 
ished)  to  learn  that  Jennie  knew  the  man,  and  he  hoped 
she'd  tell  something  about  him. 

She  seemed  willing  enough  to  do  this,  though  the  nar 
rative  wasn't  embroidered  much.  "It  was  through  his 
sister,  Sarah,  that  I  got  acquainted  with  him,"  she  con 
cluded,  "and  it's  only  the  man,  himself,  I  know.  His 
music's  miles  above  my  head." 

""Well,  it's  miles  above  mine,  too,"  Henry  admitted,  a 
little  to  his  own  surprise.  "He  begins  just  about  where 
I  leave  off. — I  have  to  take  my  hat  off  to  an  accomplish 
ment  like  his,  even  though,  in  a  way,  it — shows  me  up.  To 
myself,  I  mean." 

Under  her  intent  thoughtful  look,  and  aware  of  an  odd 
sense  of  support  he  got  from  it,  he  plunged  ahead  with 
his  confession.  "I've,  for  a  long  time,  felt  rather  mis 
treated  by  fortune.  The  only  real  ambition  I  ever  had 
was  to  be  a  musician.  Not  just  a  musical  amateur.  The 
two  things  are  worlds  apart.  But  my  father's  death  hap 
pened  at  an  unlucky  time,  and  cut  off  that  possibility. 
At  least,  that's  what  I've  always  managed  to  make  myself 
believe.  If  he  had  lived  a  few  years  longer,  and  I  could 


240         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

have  gone  on,  studying  .  .  .  But  when  I  see  what  a  born 
musician  like  March  can  do,  without  half  the  chances  or 
the  help  I  've  had,  I  have  to  admit  I  got  all  I  deserve. ' ' 

She  demurred,  reflectively,  to  this  conclusion  of  his. 
"It  isn't  always  easy  to  be  sure  what  a  person's — helps 
really  are.  Or  their  handicaps.  Some  of  the  things  that 
look  hard  for  him,  to  you,  are  just  what  made  it  easier. 
He  hadn't  anything  but  just  himself  and  his  music,  and 
his  music  was — pretty  much — all  he  wanted.  And  that 
made  it  easy  for  him  to  cut  loose.  But  a  lot  of  your  helps 
must  have  been  things  you  couldn't  cut  loose  from." 

In  his  heart  he  was  warmly  grateful  to  her  for  this  de 
fense  (and  how  wise  she  was  to  have  thought  of  it!),  but 
he  smiled  over  it,  and  shook  his  head.  "No,  I'm  just  be 
ginning  to  see  that  you  get  what  you  really  want,  in  this 
world,  though  it  doesn't  always  seem  so.  If  there 'd  been 
any  music  I  really  needed  to  write,  I'd  have  written  it. 
I'd  have  taken  my  job  at  the  bank  the  way  March  took 
his  piano  tuning — as  something  to  keep  my  sister  and 
me  alive  while  the  main  thing  went  on.  But  there  wasn't 
anything  that  had  to  be  written,  in  that  sense.  Joe  told 
me  the  truth  about  myself,  once,  during  the  first  talk  we 
ever  had.  All  I  really  asked  for,  he  said,  was  a  chance 
to  look  on." 

A  realization,  involved  with  a  memory  of  Margaret's 
dry  smile,  broke  over  him  that  he'd  been  talking  steadily 
about  himself  for  a  long  while.  Jennie  wasn't  smiling, 
though,  even  invisibly,  he  was  sure. 

"You  understand  what  you  look  on  at,"  she  remarked, 
"better  than  most  people." 

"Not  always,"  he  said  quickly,  and  wondered  whether 
he'd  ever  know  her  well  enough  to  tell  her  what  he'd  mis 
understood,  in  the  first  instance,  about  her  and  Joe.  It 
wasn't  unthinkable.  He  went  on,  "I  think  I  do  under 
stand,  well  enough,  the  thing  I  wanted  to  talk  over  with 
you,  to-night,  but  it's  a  case  where  understanding  alone 
isn't  much  good.  And  what  I've  tried  to  do  has  amounted 
to  little  worse  than  nothing.  It's  about  Beatrice  Greer." 


THE  SAMARITANS  241 

She  nodded  and  said,  "I  hoped  it  was  that.  How  bad 
do  you  think  it  is?" 

He  had  no  decisive  knowledge,  he  hastily  told  her,  that 
it  Avas  what  one  could  fairly  call  "bad"  at  all.  Only, 
when  things  had  got  to  that  stage  it  was  too  late  for 
friendly  interposition  to  do  much  good.  The  thing  that 
had  led  him  to  try  his  hand  had  been  a  chance  glimpse 
of  her  at  the  Blue  Moon  in  the  company  of  a  young  man 
his  friends  didn't  think  any  too  highly  of.  It  had  brought 
her  loneliness  and  unprotectedness  home  to  him  and  he'd 
been  trying,  in  a  rather  futile  sort  of  way,  it  seemed,  to 
remedy  these  conditions.  He'd  been  to  see  her  two  or 
three  times,  usually  after  telephoning  and  making  an 
engagement  with  her,  but  once  without  this  preliminary. 
He'd  taken  her  out  to  some  places  of  amusement,  too, 
that  he'd  thought  she'd  like,  beginning  with  Ravinia — • 
which  had  bored  her  beyond  concealment.  Of  course,  he 
must  have  bored  her  himself,  wherever  they  went,  though 
she  hadn't  told  him  so. 

"In  fact,"  he  remarked,  "it  would  have  been  easier  if 
she  had.  But  she  felt  it  necessary  to  treat  me  as  a  con 
temporary — or  rather  as  if  I  regarded  myself  as  a  con 
temporary,  and  a  competitor  with  the  others — which,  of 
course,  made  my  whole  attempt  seem  ridiculous.  If  she 
could  have  taken  me  as  an — avuncular  old  duffer,  who 
could  be  yawned  at  when  she  was  sleepy — confided  in  and 
asked  sympathy  of — sent  home  when  I  was  in  the  way, — I 
might  have  been  of  some  use  to  her. 

"As  it  was,  I've  never  felt  more  futile  in  my  life — 
though  it's  a  sensation  I'm  pretty  well  accustomed  to — 
than  last  Sunday  afternoon.  That  was  the  time  I  went 
to  see  her  without  having  telephoned  first.  I  did  it  in  an 
effort  to  seem  friendly  and  informal,  but  it  didn't  work 
out  that  way.  She  acted  pleased  enough  over  my  having 
come,  though  she  seemed  just  a  bit  embarrassed  by  it,  and 
when  she  asked  me  to  stay  for  a  scratch  dinner  with  her 
and  go  for  a  drive  afterward,  I  thought  she  really  wanted 
me  to  and  said  I  would. 


242         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"It  was  a  mistake,  of  course.  She'd  other  guests  asked 
whom  my  staying  seemed  to  make  it  necessary  to  get  rid 
of.  She  was  at  the  telephone  a  dozen  times  within  the 
liour,  getting  called  to  it  or  putting  calls  through  herself, 
and  she'd  taken  me,  unluckily,  into  the  library  where  it 
wasn't  possible  to  avoid  hearing,  more  or  less,  what  she 
said — or  guessing  pretty  well  what  they  were  saying  to 
her.  Evidently  it  was  a  pretty  rowdy  gang  she'd  com 
mitted  herself  to  and  they  were  determined  not  to  be  put 
off.  Saying  things  to  her  that  she  had  to  evade  answer 
ing  directly.  Threatening  a  descent  upon  her  in  force; — 
jocularly,  you  know,  but  more  than  half  in  earnest.  I 
took  it,  at  last,  that  she  was  trying  to  buy  them  off  by 
offering  to  send  down  to  them — wherever  they  were — a 
quart  of  Joe's  Scotch,  and  that  even  this  wasn't  accepted. 

"I'd  ignored  everything  up  to  then,  but  that  was  too 
much,  so  I  told  her  I  was  sure  my  presence  was  embarrass 
ing  her  and  said  we'd  have  our  dinner  and  our  ride  some 
•other  time.  It  wasn  't,  I  guess,  a  very  tactful  time  to  do  it, 
but  I  tried  to  make  her  see  that  the  last  thing  I  wanted 
was  to  be  in  the  way.  My  whole  purpose  in — inflicting 
myself  upon  her — I  did  use  that  word — was  to  be  service 
able  and  .  .  .  "Well,  I  thought  the  purport  of  what  I  was 
saying  was  plain  enough.  I  don 't  know  whether  she  really 
misunderstood  me  or  not.  She's  never  been  quite  candid 
with  me,  you  see.  She  denied,  by  implication,  the  first 
time  I  called  on  her,  that  she'd  ever  been  to  the  Blue, 
Moon,  with  Ware  or  any  one  else.  Anyhow  she  pretended 
now  to  understand  me  as  having  said  that  I'd  taken  her 
on  merely  as  an  obligation  I  owed  her  father.  She  whipped 
herself  up  into  such  a  tempest  about  it  that  I  couldn't 
cope  with  her,  at  all,  and  she  finished  by  telling  me  I 
could  go  and  take  my  advice  with  me  and  not  come  back. — 
"Which,  of  course,  there  was  nothing  for  it  but  for  me  to 
do. — I  suppose,  on  the  whole,  I've  made  a  pretty  average 
mess  of  it." 

"Oh,  yes,"  Jennie  answered  dispassionately.  He 
blinked  at  this,  whereupon  she  smiled  at  him,  a  smile  *rith 


THE  SAMARITANS  243 

no  alkaline  pucker  of  irony  in  it  to  make  him  feel  small  and 
inept,  and  added,  ''But  you  don't  know,  now,  how  it  hap 
pened,  exactly,  nor  where  you  missed  out  with  her. ' ' 

He  said,  earnestly,  * '  If  you  do,  I  wish  you  'd  tell  me. ' ' 

She  took  her  time  about  beginning;  lighted  and  smoked 
half  an  inch  of  a  cigarette  before  saying  a  word.  Finally, 
"I  think  about  the  only  person  you  don't  understand  very 
well,  is  yourself.  I  mean,  the  way  you  seem  to  other  peo 
ple.  You  think  you  must  look  to  them  the  way  you  do  to 
yourself.  Take  that  girl :  you  were  so  sure  she  must  think 
of  you  as — some  sort  of  'old  duffer.'  .  .  .  You  used  a 
funny  word,  there.  I  didn't  know  what  it  meant." 

"Avuncular,"  he  said  when  he  saw  she  was  waiting  to 
be  told.  ' '  It  means,  like  an  uncle. ' ' 

She  even  made  sure,  before  she  went  on,  that  she  knew 
how  to  spell  it.  "Some  time,"  she  threw  in,  "I'll  make 
you  tell  me  what  the  word  is  that  means  like  an  aunt. 

"Well,  you  were  so  sure  she  thought  of  you  like  that, 
that  when  she  wouldn't  treat  you  that  way,  you  thought 
she  must  be  pretending.  It  never  struck  you — it  couldn  't, 
I  suppose — that  you'd  really  be  a  wonderful  person  to 
her,  with  your — manners  and  culture,  and  everything, 
or  that  she'd  be  proud  beyond  anything  to  have  you  act 
as  if  you  liked  her.  I  don't  believe  she  was  bored  when 
you  took  her  to  the  opera.  She  was  just  so  afraid  of 
seeming  stupid — making  some  ignorant  break.  .  .  .  Don't 
you  see?  And  if  you'd  pretended  to  think  she  loved  it, 
and  had  asked  her  to  go  again — well,  she  'd  have  made  her 
self  think  she  loved  it,  whether  she  did  or  not,  because  you 
wanted  her  to.  And  about  last  Sunday:  I'm  sure  she 
wanted  you  to  stay,  and  was  desperately  anxious  to  get  rid 
of  her  gang.  Frightened  stiff  for  fear  they  would  come 
and  you'd  think  less  of  her  for  knowing  them.  And  when 
you  went  away,  she  thought  that  was  why. — Oh,  I  don't 
expect  to  convince  you  all  at  once!" — this  in  answer  to  a 
skeptical  shake  of  his  head.  "You've  thought  the  other 
way  too  long." 

"If  she'd  really  liked  me,"  he  said,  "I  think  she'd  have 


244 

been  candid  with  me,  and  she  never  was  that.  You  don't 
lie  to  people  you  haven't  a  certain  contempt  for." 

Jennie  dissented  vigorously  from  this  conclusion. 
"People  like  you  take  frankness  for  granted  a  lot  too 
easily.  You're  used  to  tolerance — been  brought  up  on 
it.  You  haven 't  any  idea  how  narrow-minded  most  people 
are.  If  you  want  to  do  anything  they  don't  do,  you  have 
to  take  care  they  don't  catch  you  at  it.  And  a  girl,  with 
as  much  of  her  father  in  her  as  Beatrice  has,  must  have 
found  out,  while  she  was  almost  a  baby,  that  telling  the 
truth  was  what  usually  got  her  into  trouble.  It'd  be  the 
last  thing  she  would  try  with  anybody  she  wanted  the 
good  opinion  of. — She  must  have  had  a  rotten  bringing  up, 
every  way.  I  wish  I  might  have  adopted  her,  ten  years 
ago  or  so ! " 

"Do  it  now,"  Henry  said  quickly. 

She  shook  her  head  and  smiled  faintly.  "I  got  off  on 
the  wrong  foot  with  Beatrice.  She  got  an  idea  about  the 
— basis  Joe  and  I  were  on,  and  until  she's  perfectly  sure 
that  that  was  a  mistake  of  hers  ..."  She  looked  up  at 
Henry  and  he  felt  himself  blushing  to  the  hair.  Her 
smile  broadened.  "I  guess  it  must  be  sort  of  a  natural 
thing  for  people  to  think,  from  the  way  we  treat  each 
other." 

"It  was  a  question  that  asked  itself  in  my  mind,  the 
day  of  our  first  directors'  meeting,"  he  admitted.  "But 
it  had  answered  itself,  finally,  before  that  week  was  out. — • 
I'm  glad  of  a  chance  to  apologize." 

"As  long  as  you  answered  the  question  yourself,  with 
out  asking  any  one  else,  I  don't  see  what  you  have  to 
apologize  for,"  she  said.  "I  felt  like  apologizing  to  you, 
after  Joe  came  into  my  office,  that  day.  Anyway,  it's  all 
right. — But  you  can  see  how  any  advice  I  might  give 
Beatrice,  when  she  comes  to  me  for  money — it's  the  only 
time  I  ever  see  her — would  go  down  the  wrong  way.  She 's 
spending  a  lot,  but  Joe  told  me,  before  he  left,  to  let  her 
have  all  she  wanted,  so  there's  nothing  to  do  about  that." 

"I  hope  he  comes  back  soon,"  Henry  said  at  the  end 
of  a  thoughtful  silence ;  ' '  and  takes  her  with  him  when  he 


THE  SAMARITANS  245 

goes  again.  It's  mad  of  him  to  leave  her  on  the  loose, 
like  this." 

"I  don't  know,"  Jennie  reflected  soberly.  She  was 
gazing  down  at  the  cloth,  her  elbows  on  the  table,  her  chin 
propped  upon  her  hands.  They  were  very  fine,  beauti 
ful  hands,  Henry  for  the  first  time  noted.  "She  has  to 
be  like  that,  I  guess.  She  can't  be  helped  by  shutting  her 
in,  anyway.  She's  too  much  like  Joe,  for  that.  Has  to 
find  ever3Tthing  out  for  herself,  even  if  she  gets  hurt  do 
ing  it.  If  she  could  only  start  poor,  the  way  he  did,  and 
have  to  work  for  her  life  .  .  .  She's  got  plenty  of  steam, 
you  see,  and  real — courage.  So  I  suppose  she'll  come  out 
all  right,  in  the  long  run.  Poor  old  Joe's  the  one  I'm 
sorry  for.  He 's  going  to  have  a  pretty  bad  time. ' ' 

' '  Yes, ' '  Henry  said ;  "  I  'm  afraid  he  is. ' '  He  was  think 
ing  of  more  than  the  trouble  the  girl  would  cause  him; — 
of  Violet 's  enmity  and  John 's  designs ; — and  he  must  have 
put  more  weight  of  meaning  into  the  words  than  a  mere 
agreement  with  Jennie  would  have  accounted  for,  for  she 
looked  quickly  up  at  him,  questioningly,  through  a  bright 
moisture  of  tears  that  had  sprung  into  her  eyes.  It  was 
a  look  that  established  itself  among  the  memorabilia  of  an 
altogether  memorable  evening. 

They  had  abandoned  discussion  of  the  Greers  by  tacit 
consent  at  that  point,  and  from  then  on  the  talk  had  been 
in  a  lighter-hearted  vein,  more  appropriate  to  an  event 
which  had  been  spoken  of  in  advance  as  a  party.  It  was 
among  his  triumphs  that  he'd  twice  made  her  laugh,  out 
right.  Nevertheless,  it  struck  him  as  she  drove  him  home 
that,  after  all,  they  'd  done  nothing  but  talk,  and  he  'd  per 
haps  got  more  entertainment  than  he'd  provided.  He 
might  have  suggested  their  going  on  to  a  show  after  din 
ner.  Her  having  her  own  little  coupe  at  hand,  and  her 
derisive  rejection  of  his  proposal  to  ride  out  home  with  her 
and  return  in  the  Elevated,  had  something  to  do  with  this 
feeling.  Also,  there  was  observable  about  her,  at  the 
wheel  of  her  car,  a  faint  re-emergence  of  her  efficient  of 
fice  manner. 

Anyhow,  when  he  stood  on  the  pavement  outside  his  own 


246         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

door — and  she  with  five  or  six  miles  still  to  drive  to  hers! 
— there  was  a  touch  of  apology  about  his  farewell.  She  'd 
given  him  a  delightful  evening  and  he  hoped  she  hadn't 
been  too  heavily  bored  with  all  his  talk; — such  an  un 
conscionable  lot  of  it,  he  was  afraid,  about  himself. 

At  this  she  smiled  at  him  with  a  gleam  of  clear  mis 
chief.  "Anyway,"  she  remarked,  "you've  taught  me  the 
meaning  of  the  word  avuncular.  You  don 't  want  to  forget 
that!"  She  didn't  leave  him,  though,  on  that  note,  for 
while  he  was  still  stammering  for  the  first  word  of  a  reply, 
she  added  indignantly: 

"Henry!  Use  your  imagination.  Forget  what  you 
think  you're  like,  for  a  minute,  and  think  what  this  eve 
ning  has  been  like,  for  me.  Do  you  suppose  I'm  used  to 
better  company?  Now,  if  I  say  I've  had  a  wonderful 
time,  myself,  will  you  decide  I  was  pretending?" 

"There's  an  easy  test  of  that,"  he  said.  "When  will 
you  try  it  again?" 

"Any  time!"  she  declared,  and  having  shaken  hands 
with  him  all  over  again,  she  drove  off  and  left  him  jubi 
lant. 

3 

On  the  following  Sunday  afternoon,  Jennie  got  a  tele 
gram  from  Joe  Greer.  It  had  been  delivered  at  her  flat 
before  noon,  but  as  she  had  been  out  for  lunch  she  didn't 
find  it  until  her  return,  about  four  o'clock.  He  was  ar 
riving  that  day,  he  said,  over  the  Northwestern,  at  five- 
thirty,  for  a  few  hours  only,  as  he  was  going  out  again  that 
night.  He  wanted  a  talk  with  her  and  a  visit  with  Trix. 
She  was  to  telephone  direct  to  Burns  to  meet  him  at  the 
station  and  drive  him  straight  out  to  her  flat. 

There  were  two  rather  striking  singularities  about  this 
message  and  she  paused  to  make  sure  she  understood  the 
implication  in  it  before  carrying  out  its  explicit  instruc 
tions.  It  was  queer  that  Joe,  with  so  little  time  at  his 
disposal,  should  propose  wasting  any  of  it  driving  clear 
out  to  her  flat  when  the  office,  which  would  be  right  in 
his  way,  would  be  the  natural  place  for  a  talk  with  her; 


THE  SAMARITANS  247 

especially  on  Sunday  afternoon,  when  it  was  always  quiet. 
It  was  not  sure  to  be  completely  deserted,  of  course ;  there 
was  always  the  chance  of  an  odd  draughtsman  cleaning  up 
some  job  or  other.  And  if,  for  some  reason,  Joe  didn't 
want  any  one  in  the  organization,  outside  herself,  to  know 
he'd  even  been  in  town  .  .  .  She  supposed  that  must  be 
it. 

It  was  also  worth  remark  that  he'd  instructed  her  to 
telephone  directly  to  his  chauffeur  instead  of  transmit 
ting  the  message  through  his  apartment,  the  natural  way 
to  do  it  unless  he  wanted  to  take  Beatrice  by  surprise. 
This  was  a  familiar  form  of  pleasantry  with  him  and  she 
attributed  to  him  no  ulterior  intention  now.  He  ran  the 
obvious  risk  of  missing  his  daughter  altogether — just  for 
the  pleasure  of  seeing  her  start  and  gasp  at  the  sight  of 
him — for  she  might  easily  be  out,  somewhere,  and  not 
recoverable  at  the  last  minute.  But  Jennie  believed,  in 
the  light  of  what  she'd  recently  learned  from  Henry 
Craven,  that  he  ran  a  worse  risk  than  this,  and  for  a  few 
minutes  she  wavered  over  the  alternative  of  transmitting 
the  message  to  Burns  through  Anson,  the  butler.  She 
could,  easily  enough,  pretend  to  Joe  that  she  had  misread 
his  instructions.  And  Beatrice  would  get,  in  case  she 
needed  it,  a  few  hours'  warning.  If  she  didn't  need  it, 
there  would  be  no  harm  done  beyond  the  spoiling  of  her 
father's  boyish  joke. 

The  thing  that  stood  in  the  way  of  this  humane  design 
was,  really,  nothing  but  Jennie's  professional  pride  in  her 
long  established  infallibility.  For  seven  years  Joe  had 
lived  in  an  unshaken  certainty  that  she  never  misunder 
stood  instructions  nor  failed  to  grasp  the  underlying  in 
tent  of  them,  and  she  couldn't  bear  the  thought  of  sap 
ping  that  confidence  now.  She  wasn't  afraid  of  him. 
She'd  mutinied  more  than  once; — refused,  point-blank,  to 
carry  out  his  orders  and,  at  the  time  or  afterward,  told 
him  why.  But  these  tactics  weren't  available  here,  for 
she  couldn't  tell  him  she  was  unwilling  to  have  the  girl 
taken  by  surprise,  without  giving  her  away  altogether. 


248 

So,  reluctantly,  she  telephoned  George  Burns'  boarding- 
house  and,  disappointingly,  found  him  there.  If  he'd 
been  out  with  one  of  the  cars  she'd  have  been  justified, 
she  thought,  in  calling  Anson. 

The  moment  she  told  him  who  she  was,  Burns  said — 
not  at  all  in  his  professional  manner,  "I  was  just  making 
up  my  mind  to  call  you  up,  Miss  MacArthur. ' '  With  the 
wild  idea  in  her  head  that  he  might  be  on  the  point  of 
proposing  a  joy-ride,  she  forbore  to  ask  him  why  and  went 
straight  on  with  the  transmission  of  Joe's  orders. 

He  repeated  mechanically,  "Five-thirty  at  the  North 
western,  ' '  was  silent  for  a  moment,  then  added,  as  she  was 
about  to  hang  up,  "Well,  that  settles  it.  Miss  MacArthur, 
I've  got  to  see  you,  at  once.  If  you're  at  your  flat,  I'll 
drive  straight  out  there.  There'll  still  be  time  to  meet  the 
train  if  we  decide  that's  the  thing  for  me  to  do.  You  are 
telephoning  from  your  flat,  aren't  you?" 

"I  don't  understand  at  all,"  she  protested.  "Yes,  I'm 
at  my  flat,  but  if  something's  wrong,  tell  me  what  it  is, 
now. ' ' 

"I  can't,  from  here,"  he  said  curtly.  "I've  got  to 
talk  to  you.  Nothing's  wrong — no  accident,  nor  anything 
— only  we've  got  to  decide  what  to  do."  A  click  in  the 
instrument  informed  her  that  he'd  left  the  telephone. 

There  was  nothing  for  her  to  do  but  sit  in  her  front 
window  and  look  out  for  him,  keeping  her  imagination 
in  control  as  best  she  could.  It  was  less  than  ten  minutes 
before  he  appeared,  but  in  that  time  she'd  thought  of 
enough  horrifying  possibilities  to  fill  an  evening  paper. 
She  was  holding  the  door  open  for  him  when  he  came 
springing  up  the  stairs. 

"Miss  Greer  isn't  at  home,"  he  told  her,  at  once.  "She 
was  out  all  last  night.  They  don't  know  where  she  is. 
That  fool  of  an  Anson  didn't  tell  me  about  it  till  I  called 
up,  after  lunch,  to  find  out  whether  they  were  going  to 
want  me  this  afternoon.  It  seems  she  went  out  with 
some  people  after  dinner  last  night  for  a  swim,  over  here 
at  the  hotel  beach." 


THE  SAMARITANS  249 

At  Jennie's  horrified  stare  he  impatiently  shook  his 
head.  ''No,  she  isn't  drowned,  or  there's  no  reason  for 
thinking  so.  They  got  some  sort  of  message  about  her  late 
last  night.  Couldn't  make  anything  of  it  except  that  she 
was  all  right  and  would  be  home  first  thing  this  morn 
ing.  I  asked  Anson  why  he  hadn't  got  more  than  that; — 
if  the  party  that  gave  the  message  was  drunk.  He  seemed 
to  think  that  was  disrespectful  and  none  of  my  business, 
so  lie  wouldn't  say.  I  guess  that  was  it,  though. 

"When  I  told  him  I  was  going  to  start  straight  out 
and  see  if  I  couldn  't  find  her,  he  ordered  me  to  do  nothing 
of  the  sort.  I  don't  know  whether  he's  got  a  right  to  give 
me  orders  or  not.  He's  been  with  Mr.  Greer,  of  course,  a  lot 
longer  than  I  have.  So  I  was  thinking  of  getting  your 
angle  on  it.  But  with  him  getting  in  at  five-thirty  and 
me  with  orders  to  meet  him,  we're  pretty  tight  up  against 
it." 

"Do  you  really  think  you  could  find  her?"  Jennie 
asked.  "Within  the  next  hour  or  so?" 

' '  I  don 't  know, ' '  he  said.  ' '  I  couldn 't  promise  to.  But 
I've  found  out  from  driving  her  around  where  a  good 
many  of  the  places  are  that  she  goes,  and  where  some  of 
the  people  live  that  she  runs  around  with.  Of  course, 
I'd  have  to  be  careful  what  sort  of  questions  I  asked. — 
But,  damn  it,  there  isn't  any  time!  I  ought  to  be  on  my 
way  down-town  now!" 

"You  see  if  you  can  find  the  girl,"  Jennie  commanded 
him  crisply.  "I'll  drive  in,  in  my  car,  and  meet  Mr. 
Greer.  I  can  make  it,  all  right.  That  lets  you  out,  be 
cause  I  don't  have  to  tell  him  that  I  passed  on  the  orders 
to  you  at  all.  I  felt  like  a  drive  so  I  came  down,  myself, 
instead. — He  was  coming  to  talk  to  me,  anyway.  I'll 
keep  him  as  long  as  I  can.  Call  up  Anson  whenever  you 
get  a  chance,  to  find  out  whether  she  hasn't  come  home  by 
herself.  When  Mr.  Greer  is  ready  to  go  home,  I'll  drive 
him  over — and  hope  you'll  have  got  there  first,  with  her. 
That's  all  straight,  isn't  it?" 

He  nodded,  gave  her  a  probably  unconscious  military 


250         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

salute,  and  sped  down  to  his  car.  He  was  a  good  boy,  and 
he'd  do,  she  thought,  a  good  job,  though  he'd  need  a 
reasonable  break  in  the  luck  to  make  it  successful.  Well, 
she  had  a  job  of  her  own,  on  hand,  one  in  which  she  couldn  't 
foresee  that  luck  would  figure  at  all  decisively.  It  was  just 
a  question  of  how  skilfully  she  could  manage  Joe. 

Luck  did  befriend  her,  though,  right  at  the  beginning. 
Joe's  train  was  the  better  part  of  an  hour  late.  It  was 
not  a  train  from  the  North  and  she'd  been  wondering  a 
little  uneasily  whether  there  might  not  have  been  some 
mistake  about  his  message,  when  she  was  doubly  reassured 
by  seeing  him  coming  down  the  platform.  The  way  his 
face  cleared  of  its  glowering  abstraction  when  he  caught 
sight  of  her  waiting  for  him,  made  it  plain  that  he  was 
pleased  by  her  amendment  to  his  orders. 

"That's  what  you  get  for  trying  to  improve  on  what  I 
tell  you!"  he  said  jovially.  "Cooling  your  heels  down 
here  half  a  Sunday  afternoon!  All  the  same,  I'm  glad 
you  did.  We  '11  have  a  little  ride  and  talk  as  we  go. ' ' 

He  wasn  't  talkative,  though,  and  after  a  few  perfunctory 
questions  as  to  how  things  had  been  going  in  the  office, 
whether  anything  out  of  the  ordinary  had  happened,  how 
Henry  had  been  acting  lately  (this  last  inflected  face 
tiously,  of  course)  he  lapsed  into  the  same  abstraction  she'd 
seenJiim  in  when  he  got  off  the  train. 

She  asked  him,  then,  if  it  was  really  necessary  for  him 
to  go  away  again  that  night.  Now  that  he  was  actually 
here,  couldn't  he  stay  long  enough  to  see  for  himself  how 
things  wrere  going?  Two  or  three  days  couldn't  make 
much  difference,  could  they!  He  threw  a  sharp  look  at 
her,  as  if  he  suspected  that  something  unacknowledged  lay 
behind  these  questions,  but  he  answered  them  simply  and 
emphatically  by  telling  her  that  this  was  the  week  the 
harvesting  of  the  flax  began.  The  machinery  he  had 
designed  would  be  put  to  its  first  real  test  with  the  un 
loading,  crushing,  spraying  and  storing  of  the  straw  as  it 
was  brought  to  their  warehouses  under  the  varied  condi 
tions  of  the  harvest.  Some  of  these  conditions  they 


THE  SAMARITANS  251 

wouldn't  have  foreseen.  Here  and  there,  something  was 
bound  to  break  down.  "Eve  of  battle,  see?"  he  con 
cluded  with  a  grin.  "Sheridan  twenty  miles  away!" 

After  having  worked  for  him  seven  years  she  didn't 
need  all  this  elaboration,  and,  of  course,  he  knew  it.  The 
question  he  evidently  didn't  mean  to  answer  was  why  he 
had  left  the  field  of  battle  on  the  eve  of  it.  She  remarked, 
"You  didn't  come  straight  down  from  the  North." 

His  look  conceded  a  mystery  here,  and  his  words  made 
a  boyish  joke  of  it.  "You'd  never  have  thought  of  that 
if  you'd  let  Burns  meet  me  as  I  told  you  to. — No,  I've 
been  talking  to  a  man  who  thinks  he  knows  something 
about  flax.  When  I  got  through  with  him  I  found  it  was 
just  as  easy  to  go  back  by  way  of  Chicago." 

In  his  own  good  time,  she  knew,  he'd  tell  her  the  whole 
story;  meanwhile,  she  was  content  to  wait.  She  made  no 
further  attempt  at  conversation  and  merely  drove  him 
about  at  random  among  the  less  crowded  of  the  West 
Side  streets.  At  last  he  said,  quietly: 

"Put  this  on  file,  Jennie,  where  you  won't  forget  it.  If 
anything  unexpected  turns  up,  before  I  come  back,  don't 
try  to  find  me  first.  Take  it  up  with  Henry  and  see  that 
he  goes  straight  to  Williamson  with  it.  Or  to  Corbett  or 
Crawford  if  Williamson  isn't  where  he  can  get  at  him. 
Whatever  it  is,  see  that  one  of  them  knows  about  it — you 
see  to  that,  yourself — before  you  pass  it  on  to  me." 

"All  right,  Joe,"  she  said.  She  knew  it  had  been  to 
tell  her  this,  exactly  this  and  no  more,  that  he  had  come 
to  Chicago.  Pie  was  like  that,  with  her.  He'd  offer  no 
explanations  whatever,  no  denials  that  he  foresaw  the  sort 
of  "unexpected"  thing  that  might  turn  up.  He  knew 
she'd  ask  for  nothing  of  the  sort.  It  was  wonderful  to  be 
taken  for  granted,  like  that.  It  was  this  capacity  in  him 
for  confidence  that  she  came  nearest  loving  him  for. 

He  asked  her,  presently,  in  a  perfectly  natural  man 
ner,  IIOAV  Trix  had  been  getting  on,  lately.  She  wasn't 
much  of  a  letter-writer,  he  said,  and  it  must  have  been  a 
week  since  he'd  heard  from  her. 


252         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Jennie  was  ready  with  her  answer.  "Why,  it's  three 
or  four  days  since  I've  seen  her,"  she  said.  "I  don't, 
except  when  she  comes  to  the  office.  Henry's  been  see 
ing  quite  a  lot  of  her,  though,  he  tells  me, — taking  her 
round  to  shows  and  things.  You  asked  how  he'd  .been 
acting;  you  know  it's  wonderful  what  it's  done  for  him, 
having  his  sister  away.  I've  never  seen  her  that  I  know 
of,  but  I  think  she  must  be  a — horrible  sort  of  woman." 

"Oh,  I  wouldn't  go  as  far  as  that,"  he  protested. 
"What  have  you  got  against  her?" 

"I  think  she  must  be  a  sort  of  vampire,"  Jennie  said 
judicially;  "not  a  movie  vampire  but  a  real  one.  The 
kind  that  sucks  your  blood.  That's  the  only  trouble  with 
Henry.  She'd  taken  all  the  spunk  out  of  him.  Must 
have  been  doing  it  for  years.  Making  him  think  that 
people  were  bored  with  him,  or  laughing  at  him,  all  the 
time.  He'd  be  a — peach,  if  he  could  be  let  alone  for  a 
"while. — I  wouldn't  have  dared  talk  to  you  like  this  three 
months  ago,"  she  added.  "I  thought,  then,  she  was  prob 
ably  going  to  marry  you." 

"My  God,  Jennie,  you  too!"  he  roared  at  her.  "You 
and  Trix  and  .  .  .  How  do  you  women  get  that  way  ? ' ' 

She  made  him  a  provocative  answer,  but  even  so  she 
found  she  hadn't  launched  him  as  she'd  hoped  to  do. 
* '  Trix  wrote  that  she  'd  been  up  to  Ravinia  with  him.  Has 
he  been  opening  up  with  you,  too?" 

She  confessed  to  their  dinner.  "I  had  an  awfully  good 
time  with  him,"  she  insisted  seriously.  "I  really  like  him 
a  whole  lot." 

But  this  wasn't  the  line  Joe  wanted  to  follow.  "Oh, 
yes,  he's  all  right,"  he  conceded  absently.  "Best  of  his 
gang,  by  a  long  way.  But  what  has  he  been  saying  to 
you,  now  he's  opened  out? — Anything  that  would  inter 
est  me?" 

"Everything  he  said  was  interesting,"  she  began, 
honestly  puzzled  to  see  what  he  was  driving  at,  "but  there 
wasn't  anything  up  .  .  ." 

A  vivid  flash  of  memory  interrupted  her,  and  Joe  was 


THE  SAMARITANS  253 

upon  her  instantly  with  the  demand, ' '  Well,  let 's  hear  what 
it  was  he  told  you." 

"It  was  so  nearly  nothing,"  she  answered,  after  a 
moment's  reflection,  "that  I  can't  tell  you  what  he  really 
said,  at  all.  But  I  remember  getting  the  idea,  just  for  a 
minute,  that  he  thought  you  were  in  for  some  sort  of  hard 
time  that  I  didn't  know  anything  about.  I  didn't  ask  him 
what  he  meant,  and  I  haven't  thought  of  it  again,  since." 

Joe  laughed  grimly.  "It  was  a  good  hunch,  Jennie. 
He  sees  something  headed  my  way,  all  right.  So  do  I, 
though  I  haven't  made  out  what  it  is,  yet.  Williamson 
thinks  he's  got  a  score  to  settle  with  me.  He  has,  too,  in 
a  way — though  it  isn't  what  he  thinks  it  is." 

At  the  end  of  a  reflective  silence,  he  laughed  again.  ' '  I 
was  challenged  to  fight  a  duel  once,  down  in  Quito,  by  a 
fat  Spaniard  about  Williamson's  build.  It  never  came  off 
because  the  weapons  I  chose  were  a  pair  of  old  single-action 
Colt  forty-fives.  Shoot  it  out  with  him  at  twenty  paces, 
was  my  idea.  He  was  game  all  right.  Mad  enough  for 
anything;  but  the  seconds  objected.  Williamson's  no 
Spaniard,  though.  He  balances  all  his  accounts  in  the 
ledger. 

"Oh,  it's  nothing  to  get  excited  about,"  he  went  on, 
perceiving,  Jennie  felt,  her  sudden  dismay.  "It  would 
come  to  the  same  thing  anyhow.  They  haven't  any  idea, 
none  of  that  gang,  what  a  whale  of  a  proposition  this  is 
going  to  be.  They  haven't  seen  the  country,  and  they 
don't  even  guess  at  the  clean-up  that's  waiting  for  us 
there.  Not  ten  years  from  now,  Jennie,  nor  five.  We 
can  get  ten  per  cent,  of  next  year's  crop  if  we  go  at  it 
right.  You  just  sit  down  sometime  and  figure  out  what 
that'll  mean.  When  they  do  that,  they'll  try  to  take  the 
thing  away  from  us.  That's  just  as  sure  as  to-morrow's 
sunrise.  Hell,  of  course  they  will.  You  know  that  as  well 
as  I  do.  We've  always  known  it.  That's  the  sort  of 
people  they  are.  But  this  thing  that  Henry  sees  may  be 
something  new.  Something  they  are  starting  sooner  than 
they  mean  to.  That's  what  we've  got  to  be  ready  for. 


254         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"For  thirty  years  or  so,"  he  went  on  after  a  long  re 
flective  silence,  "I've  known  that  before  I  got  through 
I  was  going  to  have  one  hell  of  a  big  fight  with  this  stall- 
fed  bunch.  You  might  say  I  'd  been  looking  forward  to  it, 
in  a  way.  I  used  to  look  forward  to  it,  for  a  fact. 
Thought  it  would  be  a  cinch,  they  looked  so  soft  and  help 
less.  Blithering  sort  of  people!  But  they  aren't  so  easy 
as  they  look,  Jennie.  I  can  see  that  from  here.  They  are 
fat,  and  they're  soft,  but  if  a  man  happened  to  be  down 
where  they  could  trample  on  him,  they'd  be  damned 
heavy.  They've  got  a  lot  of  queer  weapons,  too.  Things 
you  wouldn't  think  they'd  use,  that  get  into  you  in  a  way 
you  don 't  expect.  And,  my  God,  how  they  stick  together ! 
They  and  their  wives  and  their  poor  relations  .  .  .  ! — How 
about  Henry,  Jennie?  When  it  comes  to  a  showdown,  I 
mean.  I  know  he  likes  us  and  he  doesn't  care  a  damn  for 
them,  really.  But  if  it  came  down  to  a  vote,  say,  in  di 
rectors'  meeting,  is  there  a  tinker's  chance  that  he'd  come 
over  to  us?  A  whole  lot  might  hang  on  that,  you  know." 

' '  I  think  he  might, ' '  she  said,  ' '  if  he  saw  that  the  right 
was  on  our  side." 

"It's  so  damn  unlikely  it  will  be  on  our  side,  though," 
he  mused.  "Having  the  right  on  their  side  is  one  of  the 
best  things  they  do ; — sort  of  a  specialty  of  theirs.  All  the 
same,  we  may  get  Henry  anyhow,  one  way  or  another. — 
All  right,  Jennie !  "We  've  got  nothing  more  on  our  minds, 
have  we?  Let's  go  back.  I  want  to  see  Trix.  First  I've 
ever — missed  anybody,  just  like  that." 

They  were  out  in  Humboldt  Park,  by  now.  Jennie  had 
pulled  up  in  the  parking  space  beside  the  refectory  where 
they  could  watch  the  children  playing  in  the  rowboats  on 
the  lagoon.  She  wanted  to  keep  him  longer  if  she  could. 
Burns  hadn't  had  a  fair  chance  yet. 

"I'm  hungry,  Joe,"  she  said.  "Shan't  we  go  in  here 
and  get  a  bite  of  supper  first?"  She  hated  lying  to  him 
— and  doing  it  so  badly,  too!  Her  voice  sounded  wrong 
in  her  own  ears. 

He  looked  round  at  her  in  open  surprise.     "We  aren't 


THE  SAMARITANS  255 

a  half  hour's  drive  from  home,"  he  observed.  "I'm 
hungry  myself.  You'll  come  home  and  have  supper  with 
Trix  and  me." 

She  argued  against  this.  He'd  want  Trix  to  himself 
after  his  long  absence.  Besides,  she  didn't  know  Beatrice 
well  enough  to  come  popping  into  supper  without  any 
warning.  She  might  have  other  guests. — Or  for  that  mat 
ter,  she  might  not  be  at  home  to-night,  herself. 

"That's  the  funniest  line  of  reasoning  I  ever  heard  you 
put  up,"  he  commented  bluntly,  and  then,  telling  her  to 
wait  a  minute,  he  got  out  of  the  car.  "Going  to  tele 
phone,"  he  called  back  as  he  walked  away. 

Well,  she'd  done  all  she  could.  She  could  think  of  no 
other  stratagem  and  if  she  could,  she  wouldn't  avail  her 
self  of  it.  She  wouldn't  have  Joe  looking  at  her  again 
with  that  gleam  of  half-awakened  suspicion — not  for 
Beatrice,  nor  for  any  one  in  the  world.  Not  even  for  Joe, 
himself. 

"She  isn't  at  home,  for  a  fact,"  he  told  her  as  he  climbed 
back  into  the  little  coupe.  "They're  expecting  her  any 
minute.  I  told  Anson  vou  and  I'd  be  coming  for  sup 
per." 

She  didn't  know  whether  there  was  any  authentic  com 
fort  to  be  derived  from  this  or  not.  Burns  might  have 
found  Trix  or  the  girl  might  herself  have  telephoned  at 
last,  but  Anson  would,  most  likely,  have  said  just  what  he 
did,  in  any  case.  Jennie  drove  as  slowly  as  she  dared  un 
til  a  restless  movement  of  Joe's  betrayed  his  suspicion  that 
this  was  wyhat  she  was  doing ;  after  that  she  bored  into  the 
dense  Sunday  traffic  like  a  taxi  driver.  Four  or  five 
minutes  one  way  or  the  other  weren't  likely  to  make  much 
difference,  whereas  the  arousing  of  Joe's  jungle  sense  of 
something  amiss  would  be,  almost  certainly,  disastrous. 

The  exact  minute  of  their  arrival  did  make  a  difference, 
as  things  turned  out,  but  whether  for  the  better  or  the 
worse,  Jennie  was  unable  to  decide.  As  she  slipped  her 
Ford  into  the  south-bound  stream  of  traffic  in  Sheridan 
Road,  a  block  north  of  Joe's  apartment  building,  he  re- 


256         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 


\ 


marked,  "There  she  is!  We're  right  on  time.  That's 
the  roadster,  three  cars  ahead  of  us.  Funny  she's  letting 
Burns  drive ;  getting  bored  with  it,  already,  I  suppose. ' ' 

The  big  roadster  was  standing  before  Joe's  doorway,  in 
the  curve  of  the  semi-elliptical  drive,  when  Jennie  turned 
in,  but  neither  Beatrice  nor  the  chauffeur  had  made  any 
move  to  alight.  The  top  was  down  and  they  could  see 
that  he  had  spoken  to  her  and  was  tensely  awaiting  an 
answer.  She  was  slumped  low  in  her  seat,  nothing  visible 
of  her  but  the  top  of  her  small  hat. 

That  Joe  had  instantly  perceived  something  wrong  was 
evident.  He  did  not  hail  and  it  was  with  the  silent  swift 
ness  of  a  big  cat  that  he  left  Jennie's  car  and  made  his 
way  to  the  curb  side  of  the  other.  Burns '  head  went  back 
at  the  apparition  of  him  as  from  the  impact  of  a  blow. 
Then,  as  if  he  had  to  overcome  a  certain  rigidity,  he  got 
down  from  under  the  wheel  and  faced  his  employer.  So 
far,  no  one  had  said  a  word,  but  now  Beatrice  roused  her 
self. 

"Is  that  you,  dad,  for  a  fact?"  she  asked,  sitting  half 
erect.  "I  didn't  know  you'd  come  home.  Honest,  I 
didn't.  Thought  thoughtful  George,  here,  was  .  .  "." 
"Stringing  me"  seemed  to  be  what  she  was  trying  to  say, 
but  its  linguistic  difficulties  were  too  much  for  her.  It 
was  blazingly  clear  that  she  was  drunk. 

Joe  took  Burns  by  the  shoulders  and  pulled  him  round 
between  himself  and  the  girl.  The  two  faces,  the  bearded 
one  contorted  by  passion,  the  young  clean-shaven  one  ex 
pressionless,  were  not  six  inches  apart. 

"Where  have  you  been  with  her?  What  in  hell  have 
you  been  doing  with  her?" 

* '  Bringing  rher  home,  sir.  She  'd  gone  out  not  knowing 
you  were  coming.  When  I  got  word  of  it,  I  followed  where 
she'd  gone  and  told  her.  And  she  came  back  with  me." 

"If  there  was  any  liquor  on  your  breath,  I'd  kill  you 
•where  you  stand. — That's  the  truth,  is  it?" 

"Yes,  sir.  And  I  haven't  had  a  drink  in  eight  weeks. 
That's  true,  too." 


THE  SAMAKITANS  257 

Nothing,  Jennie  believed,  but  the  fact  that  the  big  car 
was  cramped  across  the  full  width  of  the  narrow  drive,  had 
held  her  a  witness  to  this  scene,  for  the  impulse  to  panic 
flight  had  been  strong  upon  her  from  the  moment  the  girl 
spoke.  But  pity  took  its  place  as  she  saw  Joe  accept  the 
truth  of  the  chauffeur's  statement.  The  gesture  with 
which  he  let  the  man  go  and  the  look  he  then  turned  upon 
his  daughter  were  the  most  tragic  expressions  she  had  ever 
seen. 

Tragedy,  though,  was  not  all  that  Beatrice  saw  in  her 
father's  face,  as  he  moved  round  the  car  to  the  side  where 
she  was  sitting.  She  cried  out,  not  loud  but  with  mani 
fest  terror,  as  he  came  near. 

The  cry  restored  Jennie's  motor  faculties.  She  slipped 
swiftly  from  her  seat  in  the  Ford  and  went  to  meet  him, 
ready  to  help  or  to  interpose  against  him  as  might  seem 
necessary.  He  said,  "Wait  a  minute,  Jennie,"  but  she 
did  not  stop. 

"You  can't  stay  out  here,"  she  answered.  "I'll  help 
you  in  with  her." 

"She  isn't  going  to  need  any  help,"  he  said.  "I'll  tell 
you  what  I  want  of  you,  presently." 

He  turned  to  the  girl.  "Look  at  me,  now,"  he  com 
manded,  "and  listen.  Whatever  you've  been  this  after 
noon,  you're  sober  now.  You're  going  to  get  out  of  this 
car  by  yourself  and  walk  with  me  into  that  corridor  and 
go  up  in  the  elevator  as  if  nothing  had  happened  or  was 
going  to  happen.  When  we  get  into  the  apartment  you'll 
go  into  your  own  room  to  take  off  your  hat.  And  you  11 
wait  in  there  till  I  come  in.  You  understand  all  that, 
don't  you?" 

She  was  trembling  to  the  lips  but  she  pressed  them  to 
gether  and  nodded  her  head.  "All  right,"  he  said. 
"Take  a  minute  to  think  it  over."  Then  he  turned  back 
to  Jennie. 

' '  Burns  will  drive  you  home  in  his  car.  He  can  put  up 
your  Ford  in  the  garage  first.  You  pack  a  hand-bag  and 
a  trunk.  Bring  the  bag  back  with  you  in  the  car,  in  about 


an  hour.  Leave  directions  for  the  trunk  to  be  sent  here 
to-morrow.  You're  going  to  live  here  for  a  while." 

A  protest,  the  mere  mechanical  reaction  of  surprise, 
sprang  to  her  lips  but  before  she  could  say  more  than  a 
word  he  cut  her  short. 

"That's  not  an  order,  of  course,  Jennie.  But  if  we're 
friends,  you'll  do  it.  I've  got  to  go  back  to-night.  No 
getting  out  of  that.  And  somebody's  got  to  be  here. 
You  '11  go  to  the  office  when  and  how  you  can.  We  '11  talk 
about  that  later.  But  you'll  do  it  for  me,  Jennie?" 

"I'll  do  anything  you  like,  of  course,"  she  said.  "But 
I  think  I'd  better  come  in  with  you,  now." 

A  gleam  of  clear  menace  in  his  eyes  and  an  uncontrolled 
movement  of  his  hands  showed  how  truly  she'd  seen  be 
neath  his  surface  quietness.  "I  want  her  to  myself,  for 
a  while,"  he  said.  But  he  added  instantly,  at  her  ges 
ture  of  dissent,  "  I  'm  not  going  to  hurt  her.  Give  you  my 
word  for  that. — Here,  we  '11  leave  it  to  her !  Trix,  do  you 
want  Miss  MacArthur  along  for  protection,  or  will  you 
come  with  me?" 

"I'll— I'll  be  all  right  with  you,"  she  said. 

He  opened  the  off-side  door  for  her  and  with  the  un 
obtrusive  guidance  of  his  hand  she  stepped  down  into  the 
road- way.  "I'll  be  all  right,"  she  repeated.  She  re 
leased  herself  from  his  hand  and  rather  slowly,  very  erect 
and  infinitely  pitiable,  she  walked  to  the  door.  Joe,  with 
a  wordless  nod  of  dismissal  to  the  other  pair,  followed 
her. 

From  George  Burns  as  he  drove  Jennie  home,  she  got  an 
account  of  what  had  happened.  He  told  it  with  an  ap 
pearance  of  dispassion  that  was  betrayed  only  occasionally 
by  a  flash  of  intense  feeling.  She  had  not  pressed  him 
for  it  and  he  had  taken  his  time  about  deciding  to  talk  at 
all,  so  that  they  drove  the  first  half  of  the  way  in  silence, 
but  the  conclusion  he  came  to  evidently  was  that  she  had 
better  be  put  in  full  possession  of  the  facts. 

He'd  had  no  trouble  finding  Miss  Greer.  He  had  al 
ready  learned  from  Anson  who  most  of  the  original  swim- 


THE  SAMARITANS  259 

ming  party  were,  so  lie  went  straight  to  the  hotel  beach 
and  talked  with  the  professional  instructor  there.  The 
questions  he  asked  were  not  about  Beatrice  but  about  an 
other  young  woman  he  knew  was  in  the  party,  a  married 
woman  whose  husband  had  quarreled  with  her  a  few  weeks 
ago  and  left  her.  The  swimming  professional's  natural 
surmise  would  be  that  the  chauffeur  had  been  unofficially 
retained  by  the  husband  to  pick  up  significant  facts  about 
the  wife.  ' '  It  happened  he  did  make  me  a  proposition  like 
that  the  other  day,"  Burns  interpolated,  "but  I  turned 
him  down."  The  party  had  been  talking  over  their 
plans  for  the  rest  of  the  evening  before  they  left  the 
beach,  and  a  good  long  drive  up  the  shore  had  been  agreed 
upon.  A  certain  married  couple  in  the  company  had  of 
fered  drinks  as  an  objective. 

Burns  knew  where  they  lived.  They  'd  taken  a  house  for 
the  summer,  on  the  lake  a  little  north  of  Glencoe.  It 
sounded  like  a  good  steer  to  him,  so  he  drove  straight  up 
there  as  fast  as  he  could  and  told  the  servant  who  answered 
his  ring  that  he'd  come  with  an  important  message  for 
Miss  Greer.  She  was  there,  all  right,  and  he  ought  to 
have  been  in  plenty  of  time,  as  it  was  only  just  after  six 
o'clock.  He  was  told  that  they  were  all  in  bathing,  so 
he  went  down  to  the  beach  below  the  house,  and  found 
them. 

"It  was  about  the  worst  lot  of  hang-overs  I  ever  saw," 
he  told  Jennie  candidly.  "They  must  have  been  a 
drunken  bunch  the  night  before,  for  fair.  They  were  ly 
ing  around  the  sand,  in  bathing  suits,  most  of  them — Miss 
Greer  was  all  right — trying  to  get  up  nerve  enough  to  go 
into  the  water.  It  was  pretty  cold,  with  the  off-shore  wind. 
Just  what  they  needed  to  sober  them  up. — A  lot  of  rich 
bums,  that's  all  most  of  them  are. 

"I  told  Miss  Greer  about  the  telegram  and  asked  her  to 
dress  as  fast  as  she  could  and  come  along  with  me.  She 
was  a  little  bit — boozy  (it  doesn't  take  but  a  little  to 
put  her  out),  but  she'd  have  been  all  right  by  the  end  of 
the  drive  home. 


260         JOSEPH  GREEB  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"But  the  rest  of  the  gang  pretended  they  didn't  be 
lieve  her  father  was  coming.  They've  been  kidding  her 
more  or  less,  it  seems,  about  liking  me,  and  their  gag  was 
that  I'd  made  it  up — or  that  she  and  I  had  made  it  up 
between  us,  in  order  to  go  off  by  ourselves.  They  hadn't 
any  reason  for  making  a  crack  like  that.  It's  just 'the 
natural  rottenness  of  their  minds.  They  said  they'd  all 
come  up  to  the  house  and  telephone  Miss  Greer's  apart 
ment  to  see  if  it  was  true  or  not. 

"I  ought  to  have  let  them  do  it,  of  course,  but  I  was 
so  mad  I  was  rattled  and  I  told  her  I  didn't  think  they 
knew  at  the  house  that  her  father  was  coming.  The  or 
ders  had  come  straight  through  to  me.  That  raised  a 
howl,  of  course,  and  left  her  not  knowing  whether  to  be 
lieve  me  or  not. 

"She  finally  came  along  with  me  up  to  the  house  to 
dress,  but  most  of  the  men  in  the  crowd  came  along,  too, 
joshing  her  and  arguing  with  her.  They  were  good- 
natured  enough,  all  but  one.  He's  a  fellow  named  Ware, 
who's  been  going  around  with  her  a  good  deal  lately.  He 
was  pretty  ugly,  to  me;  tried  to  'put  me  in  my  place,' 
but  wasn't  quite  sober  enough  to  do  it.  He  was  the  only 
man  in  the  crowd  who  wasn  't  in  a  bathing  suit. 

"Miss  Greer  finally  agreed  to  go  in  and  dress  and  told 
me  to  wait  in  the  car  for  her.  They  all  went  into  the 
house  together,  though.  I  waited  about  half  an  hour ;  then 
I  rang  the  front-door  bell  and  walked  right  in,  just  as  she 
was  coming  down  the  stairs  ready  to  start.  I  tried  to 
get  her  to  go  straight  out  with  me  and  get  in  the  car, 
but  the  rest  of  them  were  in  the  dining-room — you  could 
hear  them  in  there,  all  right — and  she  wanted  to  go  in  and 
say  good-by  to  them. 

"I  went  along  with  her.  They'd  got  out  some  more 
hooch  and  offered  her  a  drink,  for  a  pick-me-up,  they  said. 
I  knew  what  would  happen  if  that  started  and  asked  her 
not  to  take  anything.  I  suppose  it  was  a  mistake.  They 
guyed  her  about  it  pretty  strong  and  got  her  mad  at  me, 
so  that  she  ordered  me  out  to  the  car  to  wait  for  her. 


THE  SAMARITANS  261 

Said  she'd  come  when  she  got  ready.  There  was  nothing 
else  for  me  to  do  that  I  could  see,  unless  I  could  have 
cleaned  up  the  whole  bunch  and  carried  her  off  by  force, 
and  I  don't  believe  I  could  have  got  away  with  that. 

' '  It  was  about  fifteen  minutes  more  before  she  came  out, 
with  Ware,  the  others  following  along  behind.  I  don't 
know  how  much  she'd  had  to  drink  in  there  but  it  was 
enough  to  do  the  business  for  her.  Ware  had  put  on  a 
dust-coat  and  cap  and  he  walked  straight  up  to  the  driv 
ing  seat  and  got  in.  Miss  Greer  had  asked  him  to  drive 
her  home,  he  said. 

"I  was  holding  the  door  for  her  on  the  other  side  and 
I  waited  till  she  was  fixed  and  I  could  shut  the  door  after 
her.  I  told  her  to  stay  right  where  she  was  and  then  I 
went  around  to  Ware.  He  'd  started  the  motor  but  hadn  't 
got  his  gear-shift  in.  I  grabbed  him  by  the  wrist  and 
told  him  to  get  out ;  put  a  good  twist  on  it  too,  so  that  he 
yelped. 

"He  tumbled  out,  all  right,  and  then  started  for  me. 
I  didn't  think  he'd  do  that,  but  it's  what  I'd  been  praying 
for,  for  about  a  month.  I'd  have  rather  had  him  sober, 
but  it's  all  right.  He'll  have  what  I  gave  him  a  long 
time  after  he's  sobered  up.  I  got  in  twice  on  his  right 
eye  and  I  think  I  broke  his  nose.  And  I  gave  him  one  in 
the  pit  of  his  stomach  to  finish  him  off ; — all  inside  of  half 
a  minute.  The  rest  didn't  want  any.  Lucky  for  me,  I 
guess.  I  knew  just  where  there  was  a  handy  spanner  and 
I  'd  've  liked  to  have  waded  in  with  it.  I  might  have  killed 
somebody  just  as  well  as  not." 

He  paused,  and  Jennie  asked  her  first  question.  "Bea 
trice  didn't  try  to  get  out  of  the  car?" 

' '  No, ' '  he  said,  and  added  after  another  pause :  ' '  She 
was  perfectly  willing  to  come  with  me." 

Evidently,  though,  the  drive  home  with  her  wasn't  to 
furnish  many  details.  "She  was  pretty  excited  one  way 
and  another — "  he  summarized,  presently,  "but  when  she 
quieted  down  she  was  sort  of  dopey,  just  like  you  saw  her. 
I  stopped  at  a  cafeteria  on  the  way  down  and  tried  to  get 


262         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

her  to  come  in  and  have  some  black  coffee,  but  she 
wouldn't  and  I  didn't  want  to  start  anything  conspicuous. 
I  'd  have  tried  harder  but  I  thought  there  was  a  pretty  good 
chance,  if  Mr.  Greer  was  going  to  have  a  long  business 
talk  with  you,  that  I  could  get  her  home  ahead  of  him. 
Happening  the  way  it  did  was  just  exactly  wrong." 

"That's  what  I  thought,  at  the  time,"  Jennie  said. 
"I'm  not  sure,  though,  that  it  didn't  happen  just  exactly 
right." 

"To  make  her  father  put  his  foot  down  on  her?"  he 
asked,  and  shook  his  head  skeptically.  "I  don't  believe 
it  does  anybody  any  good  to  be  showed  up  looking  worse 
than  they  really  are.  Specially  not  when  they're  young. 
And  a  man  like  that — like  Mr.  Greer — will  always  sort  of 
half  believe  the  worst  about  it.  Every  time  he  gets  mad, 
he'll  show  her  that  he  believes  it. — I  never  thought  I  had 
much  of  a  chance,  but  when  I  look  at  the  kind  of  chance 
she's  had  .  .  .  !  She's  a  fine  girl,  Miss  MacArthur, — • 
poisoned ! ' ' 

He  had  more  to  say  about  her,  now  he  was  fairly  started, 
to  which  Jennie  listened  only  half  attentively.  She'd 
taken  to  swimming  and  diving  as  naturally  as  a  seal. 
Born  in  her,  it  was;  she'd  never  learned  at  all  until  she 
came  to  Chicago.  And  she  could  drive  a  car — as  far  as 
mere  driving  went — as  well  as  George  himself.  She  was 
as  quick  as  lightning.  She  had  all  the  pluck  in  the  world, 
and  never  lost  her  head.  She'd  have  made  a  wonder  of  a 
flyer  if  she  'd  been  a  man.  And  she  was  a  lot  smarter  than 
most  men ;  took  after  her  father  in  that,  George  supposed. 
Unconsciously  and,  to  Jennie  rather  pathetically,  he  was 
giving  himself  away,  hand  over  hand.  Before  he'd 
brought  her  back  to  Joe's  apartment,  he'd  given  her  a  lot 
to  think  "vbout. 

This  "^as  the  better  part  of  two  hours  later,  for  she 
gave  -Joe  all  the  time  she  could  in  which  to  get  the  girl 
sober  and  reach  an  understanding  with  her — assuming  any 
understanding  whatever  was  possible.  She  looked  for 
ward  to  her  return  to  that  flat  as  to  the  crater  of  an  ac- 


THE  SAMARITANS  263 

live  volcano.  But  her  foresight,  here,  was  altogether  at 
fault.  Joe  himself  let  her  in,  carried  her  bag  to  the 
room  that  was  to  be  hers  and  asked  her,  when  she  was 
ready,  to  come  out  into  the  library  for  a  smoke  with  him. 
Trix,  he  said,  was  asleep. 

His  mood  was  strangely  slack  and  his  manner  quieter 
than  any  she  could  remember  in  him.  He  knew  how  she 
hated  taking  this  job,  he  said,  but  it  wouldn't  be  for  very 
long.  By  the  middle  of  September,  he  thought,  he'd  be 
able  to  be  at  home  again,  permanently  except  for  short 
trips.  Meanwhile,  Jennie  possessed  his  full  authority  over 
everything.  Trix  understood  this  and  agreed  to  it; 
seemed  to  be  glad,  rather  than  otherwise,  that  Jennie  was 
coming,  since  she  had  been  lonely  as  the  devil. 

"She's  got,  though,"  he  told  her,  "the  better  half  of 
that  original  thousand  I  sent  her,  tucked  away,  somewhere ; 
and  if  she  really  makes  up  her  mind  to  quit  you  won't  be 
able  to  stop  her.  No  more  could  I,  of  course.  You'll  do 
as  well  as  I've  done,  I  guess,  and  if  she  goes  I  won't  lay 
it  up  against  you.  But  keep  her  for  me  if  you  can, 
Jennie. ' ' 

"Are  you  sure,"  she  asked — it  wasn't  a  comfortable  sort 
of  question — "that  Beatrice  understood  what  you  ex 
pect  me  to  do?  I  mean,  that  she  will  understand  it  when 
she  wakes  up  in  the  morning  and  finds  you  gone — and  me 
here?" 

"Was  she  sober  enough  to  understand  it — is  that  what 
you  mean?  Yes,  of  course  she  was.  She  wasn't  very 
drunk  when  Burns  brought  her  in,  dazed  more  than  any 
thing  else,  and  rattled  at  seeing  me.  I  gave  her  some 
thing  that  fixed  her  up,  right  off  That's  one  sort  of 
doctoring  I  know  all  about,  anyhow.  God,  I  never  thought 
I  'd  need  it  for  my  own  daughter,  though ! 

"However,  that's  bygones,  absolutely.  You  want  to 
remember  that,  Jennie.  The  slate's  clean.  It  wasn't  her 
fault  in  the  first  place.  Mine  a  wiiole  lot  more  than 
hers." 

He  poured  himself  a  drink  and  settled  himself  in  a  big 


264         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

chair.  "I  was  beginning  to  get  a  fool  idea  that  some  of 
these  people  we  were  doing  business  with  were  the  sort 
we  could  tie  up  to ;  make  friends  with,  as  we  settled  down, 
you  know.  That's  the  bottom  of  the  whole  trouble.  Trix 
found  'em  out  for  a  lot  of  rotters  before  I  did,  I'll  say 
that  for  her,  but  I  came  around  to  her  way  of  thinking 
before  I  went  north.  "We'll  do  business  with  'em,  Jennie, 
up  to  the  hilt — farther  than  they  expect,  maybe,  but  that's 
all  we'll  do.  Why,  that  woman,  Williamson's  wife,  prom 
ised  to  give  Trix  a  hand,  show  her  the  ropes  a  bit  as  she 
needed  it;  asked  me  not  to  send  her  east  with  Henry's 
sister  so  she  could  have  a  good  time  with  her  girl's  crowd. 
And  then  never  looked  at  her.  Trix  says  she  asked  the 
girl,  Dodo,  they  call  her,  to  lunch  one  day  and  bring  a 
friend  of  hers  along,  and  they  turned  her  down  cold. 

"Well,  I  could  have  told  her  they  would,  by  that  time. 
I'd  had  my  own  experience,  by  then.  There  are  some 
kinds  of  things  I  didn't  suppose  I  could  ever  be  surprised 
about,  any  more,  but,  my  God,  I  was  mistaken.  Found 
out  I  hadn  't  been  named  Joseph  for  nothing,  either.  Now 
if  you  know  your  Bible  you  can  go  as  far  as  you  like. — 

"You  know  I've  always  said  we  were  a  different  breed 
of  cats  from  that  gang.  That 's  what  we  are.  A  different 
breed,  people  like  you  and  me.  And  Trix  too.  I  forgot 
that  for  a  while,  but  I'm  straightened  out  on  it  now. 
The  only  way  to  treat  'em  is  to  lick  hell  out  of  'em,  so 
they  won't  try  to  trample  you,  and  then  let  'em  alone. 
They  can  say  what  they  like  and  think  what  they  please, 
and  we  don't  care  one  damn.  That's  what  I  was  telling 
Trix  before  she  went  to  sleep.  We're  going  to  turn  over 
and  start  with  a  clean  page." 

There  was  nothing  very  new  about  any  of  this  to  Jen 
nie,  except  that  it  didn't  sound  like  Joe;  there  was  none 
of  his  characteristic  effervescence  about  it;  it  was  like 
flat  champagne.  She  wished  he'd  drink  some  champagne 
instead  of  morosely  sipping  that  whisky.  She  could  think 
of  nothing  comforting  or  stimulating  to  say  to  him;  the 
flatness  of  his  mood  seemed  contagious. 


THE  SAMARITANS  265 

"There's  a  swine  named  Ware,"  he  said,  after  a  period 
of  dark  rumination,  ' '  who 's  been  at  the  bottom  of  most  of 
this  trouble.  He's  one  of  their  lot,  though  I  guess  they 
know  what  a  rotter  he  is.  Trix  met  him  at  the  William 
sons'  the  one  day  we  were  up  there.  One  of  these  days, 
when  I  get  around  to  it,  I'll  deal  with  him — separately." 

"Did  Beatrice  tell  you  how  he's  already  been  dealt 
with  ? ' '  Jennie  asked.  Evidently  not,  for  Joe  asked  what 
she  meant.  Had  Burns  been  telling  her  about  to-day's  af 
fair  ?  How  much  did  she  know  about  it  ? 

She'd  rather  hoped  for  a  chance  to  tell  Joe  the  story  of 
the  boy's  resourcefulness  and  loyalty,  but  she  felt  a  little 
uncertain  as  she  began  whether  it  had  been  wise  or  not  to 
launch  out  upon  it — a  misgiving  which  deepened  as  she 
went  on.  Was  the  chauffeur's  account  contradicting,  in 
some  vital  way,  the  story  Trix  had  told  her  father?  His 
dark  set  face  was  disquieting  but  not  informative.  She 
condensed  the  tale  as  much  as  she  dared,  but  Ware's  lick 
ing,  which  must  be  accounted  for  as  well  as  described, 
involved  a  lot. 

Uneasy  as  she'd  been  all  the  while  she  talked,  she  was 
utterly  unprepared  for  the  line  Joe  took  when  she  finished. 
"The  first  thing  to  do  to-morrow  morning,"  he  said,  "is 
to  let  him  go.  See  to  that,  will  you?" 

"Let  him  go!"  she  cried  incredulously.  "George 
Burns?  After  what  he's  done  for  you  to-day?  You  don't 
want  me  to  do  that,  Joe!  I  wouldn't  do  it." 

Her  defiance  didn't  arouse  him  at  all.  "I'll  let  him 
know  to-night  then  that  he's  discharged.  Guess  that'd  be 
better  anyway. ' '  He  said  it  without  conviction  but  equally 
without  any  sign  of  wavering. 

"That'll  be  the  first  really  unfair  thing  I've  ever  known 
you  to  do,  Joe. — If  you  really  do  it.  I  don't  believe  you 
will.  You  can't  reward  a  really  fine  service  that  way. 
Why,  if  she'd  been  drowning,  and  he'd  .  .  .  " 

"I  know  all  that,"  he  interrupted.  "And  I'll  reward 
him,  too.  You  can  write  him  any  sort  of  recommendation 
you  like,  to-night,  and  I  '11  sign  it.  Write  him  a  check,  too, 


266         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

for  a  thousand  dollars,  and  I'll  sign  that.  Look  here! 
You've  always  kicked  on  my  keeping  him  as  a  chauffeur, 
haven't  you?  Said  he  was  too  good  for  it.  "Well,  now 
I'm  doing  what  you've  always  wanted  me  to.  That  thou 
sand  w*ill  get  him  two  years'  schooling,  if  he  wants  it.  Or 
set  him  up  in  a  little  business  for  himself.  Buy  him  a  taxi- 
cab.  Anything  he  likes.  As  a  reward  for  what  he  did  to 
day.  Nothing  unfair  about  that,  is  there?  The  only 
string  on  it  is  that  he's  got  to  keep  away  from  me  and  my 
daughter.  I  don't  want  him  around. 

' '  Because  he  was  mixed  up  in  that  mess,  more  or  less. 
Else,  howr  did  he  know  how  to  find  her  as  easy  as  that? 
Why  wouldn't  they  believe  him  when  he  said  he  had  a 
message  from  me?  You  can  see  that  yourself!  For  that 
matter,  why  did  Trix  keep  all  that  end  of  it  dark?  She 
did.  You've  given  it  away,  you  know. 

" — I  told  her  we  were  going  to  let  bygones  be  bygones. 
Start  with  a  clean  slate.  Well,  we  are !  I  'm  never  going 
to  ask  her  another  question.  Even  about  this.  But  if 
she  or  you  has  got  any  idea  I'll  keep  a  man  working  for 
me  as  chauffeur  who  she 's  let  get  to  know  her  as  well  as  he 
seems  to,  you're  making  a  big  mistake." 

"I  really  believe,"  Jennie  said  deliberately,  "that 
George  Burns — chauffeur  or  not — is  the  best  friend  Bea 
trice  has  to-day.  I  believe  he's  got  the  best  influence  over 
her.  He's  certainly  done  more  than  either  Henry  Craven 
or  I,  though  we've  worried  and  wondered  and  done  what 
we  could.  But  he's  really — held  out  a  hand  to  her,  I 
guess.  It's  only  a  guess,  of  course." 

"Well,  now  you've  said  it  yourself!"  he  declared.  "I 
won't  have  her  making  friends  with  a  man  like  that. 
Friends — hell !  Three  months  of  a  friendship  like  that  and 
father  gets  a  telegram  from  Crown  Point  saying,  'We're 
married.'  There's  one  in  the  newspaper  every  morning. 
But  it's  a  thing  that  isn't  going  to  happen  in  my  family, 
and  that's  a  tip  you  can  bet  on.  And  when  you  hire  a 
new  chauffeur,  to-morrow,  see  that  you  get  one  that  there 
won't  be  any  temptation  to  hold  hands  with." 


THE  SAMARITANS  267 

A  certain  penetrative  power  which  she'd  always  found 
in  his  mental  processes  up  to  now,  was  lacking  to-night. 
It  was  as  if  a  light  had  been  switched  off.  And  in  the 
absence  of  it  she  was  conscious  of  a  sort  of  stupid  vul 
garity  about  his  way  of  seeing  and  putting  things.  He  was 
still  suffering  from  the  shock  Beatrice  had  given  him, 
fumbling  about  in  a  twilight,  upsetting  things.  She  hated 
having  him  go  away  to-night  leaving  these  irrevocable  de 
cisions  behind  him  and  with  a  touch  of  real  timidity  she 
urged,  again,  his  staying  over  one  more  day. 

As  she'd  feared,  this  only  irritated  him.  " Can't  you 
understand  plain  facts?"  he  snapped  at  her.  "I've  got 
to  be  on  the  ground  to-morrow  night.  "We  begin  receiv 
ing  in  the  Number  One  warehouse  Tuesday  morning.  And 
I  haven't  got  any  aeroplane.  Anyhow,  I'm  glad  to  go. 
Had  about  enough  for  one  trip, — and  I  guess  Trix  has  had 
enough  of  me." 

His  manner  turned  kindlier  when  it  came  time  for  him 
to  go  and  he  tried  as  best  he  could  to  reassure  her.  He 
wouldn't  quarrel  with  Burns,  nor  make  the  boy  feel  that 
he  was  being  dismissed.  Jennie  needn't  worry  about  that. 
And  he  was  sure  she  wouldn't  have  any  trouble  with 
Beatrice.  "She  understands  that  I'm  backing  you  up, 
whatever  you  do,  and  that  it  won't  do  her  any  good  to 
appeal  to  me  over  your  head.  I  don't  believe  she'll  try 
it,  but  if  she  does  I  promise  it  won't  get  her  anything. 
Your  veto  goes  with  me." 

"But  what's  the  child  going  to  do?"  Jennie  asked 
desperately,  of  the  universe  rather  than  of  Joe.  "What 
is  there  she  can  do?" 

His  answer  was  that  she  could  do  any  of  the  things 
decent  people  ordinarily  did.  She  was  to  cut  out  drink 
ing,  dancing  in  tough  cabarets  and  nocturnal  joy-riding. 
She  was  to  steer  clear,  altogether,  of  the  gang  she  had  been 
running  with.  But  even  after  these  deletions  there  was 
still  plenty  left,  as  far  as  he  could  see. 


268         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

4 

It  seemed  to  Jennie  that  two  people  conld  hardly  be 
brought  into  close  quarters  in  a  situation  more  thoroughly 
false  and  hopeless  than  this  that  Joe  had  left  her  and 
Beatrice  in.  For  three  days  she  avoided  discussion  with 
the  girl,  though  whether  this  was  tactics  or  cowardice  on 
her  own  part,  she  couldn't  feel  sure.  She  was  anxious  not 
to  take  a  line  until  she  could  work  one  out  that  showed 
promise  of  getting  them  somewhere. 

Trix,  who  had  never  particularly  liked  her,  undoubtedly 
detested  her,  now.  An  attitude,  therefore,  appropriate 
to  a  friendly  guest  and  companion  would  be  so  glaring  an 
affectation  as  to  be,  to  the  girl,  insufferable.  Yet  the 
only  obvious  alternative,  a  governessy  middle-aged  pose, 
authority  made  easy  by  bits  of  encouragement,  orders 
sugar-coated  into  the  form  of  advice  and  suggestion,  would 
drive  her  to  open  rebellion — if  not,  Jennie  reflected,  to 
homicide ! 

Meanwhile,  lying  low,  going  early  to  the  office  and 
coming  back  just  in  time  for  dinner,  bringing  home  work 
to  do  in  the  evening,  sticking  to  a  casual  preoccupied  and 
not  over-friendly  tone  in  the  strictly  unimportant  conver 
sation  she  addressed  to  the  girl,  she  found  a  modus  vivendi 
establishing  itself.  On  the  first  morning  at  breakfast,  in 
reply  to  a  domestic  question  raised  by  the  butler  upon  the 
tentative  presumption  that  she  was  now  the  head  of  the 
household,  she  had  told  him  to  go  on  taking  his  orders 
from  Miss  Greer  as  usual. 

After  dinner  that  same  night  Beatrice  brought  the 
question  up,  explicitly.  "Anson  says  you  told  him  I  was 
to  go  on  giving  the  orders.  Is  that  what  you  meant?" 

"Heavens!"  said  Jennie,  looking  round  her  paper,  "I 
don't  know  anything  about  running  an  establishment  like 
this.  You'll  have  to  do  that." 

"Does  that  take  in  the  cars,  too — and  the  new  chauf 
feur?" 

Jennie  ignored  the  overt  resentment  in  the  last  phrase. 
"Why  not?  I've  no  use  for  him.  I  drive  my  own!" 


THE  SAMARITANS  269 

It  struck  her  as  she  plunged  back  into  her  reading  (too 
suddenly,  she  was  aware,  for  good  histrionism)  that  her 
young  ward  looked  a  bit  let  down.  If  she  'd  been  luxuriat 
ing  in  the  close-confinement,  bread-and-water  theory,  this 
treatment  was  sound — as  far  as  it  went. 

But  it  went  nowhere  near  far  enough.  It  supplied  in 
sufficient  material  even  for  small  talk,  let  alone  real  com 
panionship.  Jennie  found  her  rule,  to  do  nothing  and  to 
say  nothing  except  when  there  was  something  perfectly  ob 
vious  for  her  to  do  or  say,  wearing  pretty  thin.  Finally, 
after  their  third  dinner  together,  a  meal  eaten  dismally 
through  in  almost  total  silence,  Beatrice  exploded. 

"I  think,  after  this,"  she  said,  "I'll  have  my  meals  in 
my  room.  I  can't  stand  this.  It's  too — ghastly." 

"It  is  ghastly,"  Jennie  agreed,  "and  it's  ridiculous. 
I've  had  all  I  can  stand  of  it  myself.  Of  all  the  prepos 
terous,  idiotic  things  your  father  ever  did,  chucking  you 
and  me  together  like  this  is  the  worst !  I  don 't  know  what 
to  do  about  it,  any  better  than  you  do.  I've  been  afraid 
to  open  my  mouth  for  three  days,  for  fear  of  getting  in 
worse  with  you  than  I  was,  and  I  was  in  badly  enough, 
already.  I'm  ready  to  try  saying  everything  that  comes 
into  my  head  and  see  what  happens.  It  can't  be  worse 
than  this.  Perhaps  if  you  do  the  same  thing,  we  may  get 
somewhere. ' ' 

Trix  had  been  staring  at  her,  from  the  first  words,  in 
blank  simple  incredulity  at  first,  later  through  a  tangle  of 
contradictory  surmises  and  doubts.  She  wrent  on  staring, 
for  a  while,  after  Jennie  had  done.  "All  right,"  she  said, 
at  last.  "This  is  what  I'm  thinking.  If  you  hate  it  like 
this,  and  think  it's  idiotic  of  father  to  have  asked  you  to 
come  here,  why  did  you  do  it?" 

"I'm  terribly  fond  of  him,"  Jennie  answered  instantly. 
"Not  the  way  I  guess  you  thought  I  was  when  you  first 
came  out  here.  I  've  never  been  in  love  with  him,  and  he 's 
never  tried  to  make  love  to  me.  But  there's  hardly  any 
body  I  've  cared  for  as  much  as  I  do  for  him, — and  there 's 
nobody  on  God 's  green  earth  that  I  'd  go  as  far  for,  in  th? 


270         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

way  of  doing  what  lie  wanted  me  to.  He  looked  so  per 
fectly  sick  and  helpless  last  Sunday  night  over  what  had 
happened,  that  it  never  occurred  to  me,  till  he'd  gone  off 
and  left  me  here,  that  I  'd  had  any  choice  in  the  matter. ' ' 

"You're  on  his  side,  though,"  the  girl  remarked.  "You 
don't  care  anything  about  me.  You've  made  that  plain 
enough  from  the  first." 

"Don't  hint,"  Jennie  commanded  crisply.  "We've 
made  a  good  start  talking  out.  Let's  keep  it  up.  How 
did  I  make  it  plain  I  didn't  like  you?" 

"You've  never  come  here  to  the  house,  since  I've  been 
here,  though  he's  asked  you  to,  he  says.  But  you  used  to 
come,  before  that." 

"You  never  asked  me  to  come.  I  thought  you  would 
when  you  made  up  your  mind  I  was  all  right,  and  I  'd  wait 
for  that. — But  of  course  I'm  on  his  side,"  Jennie  went 
on.  "As  I  said,  I'm  fond  of  him.  All  I've  cared  about 
you  was  whether  you  were  going  to  make  him  happy  or 
miserable.  That's  all  I've  had  a  chance  to  care  about, 
because  I  don't  know  you  very  well.  I  think  I  could  get 
to  like  you,  if  we  ever  had  a  decent  human  chance.  You  're 
enough  like  him,  for  that. 

' '  But  in  this  last  particular  mess  I  was  on  your  side.  I 
did  all  I  could  to  keep  it  from  being  a  mess.  I  met  Joe 
at  the  train,  myself,  and  lied  to  him  about  the  reason  why 
— which  isn't  a  thing  I  like  to  do  with  people  I  care  about. 
I  kept  him  away  from  home  as  long  as  I  possibly  could,  to 
give  George  Burns  a  chance  to  bring  you  back,  first.  So 
I  haven't  been  an — enemy,  exactly." 

The  girl's  eyes  were  smoldering.  "If  you  weren't  an 
enemy,  why  did  you  give  George  away?"  she  asked  sul 
lenly. 

"That  was  my  mistake,"  Jennie  admitted.  "I  didn't 
think  of  it  as  giving  him  away.  I  thought  he'd  done  a 
good  job  and  I  wanted  him  to  get  the  credit  for  it.  When 
I  saw  how  Joe  was  taking  it,  it  was  too  late  to  stop. ' ' 

' '  I  should  think  you  might  have  known ! ' ' 

It  wasn't  a  gracious  reception  of  an  apology,  but  there 


THE  SAMARITANS  271 

was  a  note  of  wavering  in  it,  that  gave  the  older  woman 
an  intimation  of  victory.  She  Avas  content  to  say,  ' '  That 's 
right;  I  suppose  I  might  have,"  and  waited. 

"Oh,  I  haven't  got  anything  against  you — especially," 
Trix  broke  out,  at  last.  "And  I  don't  suppose  it's  your 
fault  that  you're  here.  But — did  you  ever  have  anybody 
watching  you  and  telling  tales  on  you?  Making  that  their 
business?  Well,  you'd  hate  it,  too.  And  you'd  hate  any 
body  that  did  it.  And  the  nicer  and  smoother  they  tried 
to  be,  the  more  you'd  hate  them. — I  don't  know  why 
you've  been  letting  me  alone,  like  you  have;  having  ine 
give  the  orders  and  letting  me  go  wherever  I  liked  in  the 
car  ..." 

"But  you  think  it  was  because  I  was  trying  to  get 
something  on  you,  to  report  to  Joe?  Is  that  it?  Good 
lord!  Talk  about  poisoning  wells!  I  don't  mean  you, — 
nor  Joe,  either.  But  what  a  situation!" 

She  took  a  minute  to  think  it  over;  blankly,  at  first, 
but  then  she  began  to  find  her  line.  "Look  here,  Trix," 
she  said ;  "  we  '11  sign  a  treaty.  I  '11  give  you  my  word  not  to 
write  any  letters  to  Joe  about  you,  or  about  anything  that 
concerns  you.  You  manage  the  correspondence  yourself. 
If  we  come  to  a  final  smash,  I'll  write  and  tell  him  why, 
but  I'll  show  you  the  letter  before  it  goes.  In  the  mean 
time,  I'm  not  a  spy.  I'm  not  watching  you,  and  I'm  not 
having  you  watched,  either.  I  won't  ask  the  new  chauf 
feur  where  you've  been.  That's  the  sort  of  thing  I  mean. 
Is  that  all  right,  as  far  as  it  goes?" 

The  girl  had  curled  herself  up  in  a  corner  of  the  daven 
port,  her  chin  in  the  crook  of  an  elbow.  There  was  some 
thing  compact  about  her  poses,  even  in  relaxation.  She 
looked  quite  a  lot  like  a  young  tom-cat.  She  said  nothing 
to  Jennie's  proposal  for  the  better  part  of  a  minute,  when 
she  did  speak  it  was  not  to  answer. 

"What  do  you  want  me  to  promise,  on  my  side?"  she 
asked. 

"I  can't  think  of  anything  I  want  to  ask  you  to  prom 
ise."  Jennie  had  put  a  faint  stress  on  the  word  ask,  but 


272         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

she  didn't  know  whether  it  had  reached  the  girl's  ear  or 
not. 

After  another  silence  Beatrice  asked,  "Does  that  in 
clude  telegrams,  too? — That  you  won't  send  father,  about 
me?" 

Until  she  tacked  on  the  supplementary  question,  Jen 
nie  hadn't  the  least  idea  what  she  was  talking  about. 
"Telegrams?"  she  echoed.  Then  as  the  meaning  broke 
over  her,  "Oh!  .  .  .  Good  God!" 

The  surge  of  contemptuous  disgust  at  a  suspicion  so 
mean,  and  a  mind  ungenerous  enough  to  entertain  it,  was 
openly  revealed  in  her  tone.  Trix  looked  round,  met  Jen 
nie's  eyes  and  then  lowered  her  own. 

"I'm  sorry,"  she  said.  "I  beg  your  pardon  for  asking 
that. — Only  what  are  you  doing  it  for?  If  you're  that 
kind  of  a  person,  why  did  you  come  ?  And  if  you  despise 
me  like  that  and — and  aren't  going  to  tell  on  me,  why  do 
you  stay?  I  know  you  hate  it.  You  said  you  did.  And 
it  seemed  as  if  there  must  be  a  trick  about  it,  somehow." 

Jennie's  mood  veered  suddenly  round  to  pity.  "You 
poor  child,"  she  said;  "you  have  had  a  rotten  time  of  it, 
haven't  you?  I'll  try  to  tell  you  the  why  of  it  all,  as  far 
as  I'm  concerned.  I  came,  as  I  did,  because  Joe  wanted 
me  to.  It  was  a  little  weak-minded  of  me,  I  guess.  One 
of  the  things  in  the  world  I  'm  proud  of  is  the  idea  he 's  got 
that  I  never  fail  him.  He  certainly  needed  help  from 
somewhere,  Sunday  night,  so  when  he  asked  me  for  it, 
I  said  I'd  try. — On  the  off  chance,  to  tell  the  truth,  that 
I  could  make  a  better  job  of  it  than  he  had.  I  can  do 
better  than  he,  once  in  a  while,  with  certain  kinds  of 
things. 

"I'll  tell  you  why  I  thought  perhaps  I  could,  here.  It's 
because  you're  so  much  like  him.  I've  worked  for  him — 
and  with  him — for  seven  years,  which  is  seven  times  as 
long,  he  says,  as  any  one  else  ever  lasted.  I  know  his 
faults  like  a  book.  He's  suspicious,  just  the  way  you  are. 
He's  got  the  devil's  own  temper.  He  doesn't  bother — 
much — about  other  people's  rights;  expects  them  to  look 


THE  SAMARITANS  273 

out  for  their  own,  and  fight  for  them  if  necessary.  And 
along  with  all  that,  he's  the  biggest  man  I  know,  and  the 
ablest,  and  one  of  the  most  lovable.  I  've  got  on  with  him, 
and  been  a  help  to  him,  and  I'm  proud  of  it.  And  since 
you're  like  him,  I  was  interested  to  see  whether  I  couldn't 
get  on  with  you,  too;  and  be  a  help  to  you. 

"He's  handicapped  with  you,  of  course,  by  the  fact 
that  he  adores  you.  I  've  never  known  him  to  be  like  that, 
before.  Ever  since  he  wrote  you  that  letter.  He's  been 
like  a  boy  about  you;  fierce  and  proud — and  some  times 
downright  idiotic.  Well,  I  don't  adore  you, — no  more 
than  I  do  him.  If  I'd  adored  him — or  been  afraid  of 
him — I'd  have  lasted  about  one  month. 

"I've  made  up  my  mind  I'll  try  treating  you  the  way 
I've  always  treated  him.  I've  never  told  tales  on  him. 
He's  found  out  that  when  he  tells  me  a  thing,  it's  buried. 
I  don 't  even  tell  it  back  to  him  as  a  reminder.  That 's  why 
I  won't  tell  tales  of  you.  You'll  find  it  out,  gradually,  if 
there's  time  enough.  I  never  ask  him  questions.  Some 
times  he  tells  me  things  for  fun,  and  sometimes  to  see  how 
they  strike  me, — but  never  because  I  claim  any  right  to 
know.  I  won't  claim  any  such  rights  with  you.  You 
aren't  under  any  obligation  to  me.  You  don't  have  to 
ask  my  permission  to  do  anything.  You  don't  even  have 
to  pretend  you  like  me; — he  never  bothered  to  do  that. 
I'm  here,  that's  all.  I'm  intelligent  and  shock-proof  and 
experienced.  Experienced  in  more  ways  than  you  're  likely 
to  think. — I  mean,  I'm  not  an  old  maid,  exactly." 

"How  old  are  you?"  Trix  asked. 

"Oh,  I'm  old  enough,"  said  Jennie,  composedly; 
"thirty-four." 

This  seemed  to  be  about  all.  She  got  up,  lighted  her 
self  a  cigarette,  unfolded  an  evening  paper  and  carried  it 
across  to  the  windows.  Then  she  heard  Beatrice  speak 
ing. 

"You  aren't  old  enough  to  have  been  my  mother.  But 
I  wish  my  mother  had  been  a  person  like  you.  I  wish  I  'd 
known  somebody  like  you — before  this." 


274         JOSEPH  GEEER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Jennie's  "line,"  which  she'd  been  feeling  a  bit  too 
complacent  about,  failed  her  suddenly  at  this  point.  It 
was  beautifully  logical  to  decide  to  treat  the  girl,  in  all 
situations,  as  she'd  have  treated  the  girl's  father; — but 
what  would  she  have  done  with  Joe,  if,  at  the  end  of  one 
of  their  talks,  he'd  burst  into  tears? 

She  went  back  to  the  davenport,  patted  the  heaving 
shoulder,  clumsily  she  felt,  tried  to  say  something  en 
couraging — and,  to  her  consternation,  heard  her  own  voice 
break  and  saw  Beatrice  swim  away  in  a  blur  of  tears. 

The  break  caught  the  girl's  attention,  instantly.  She 
stopped  weeping,  sprang  up,  took  a  look  to  make  sure  and, 
with  a  laugh,  flung  her  arms  round  Jennie.  "You  aren't 
as  hard-boiled  as  you  let  on  to  be,"  she  said. 

"I  was  a  fool  to  say  I  was  experienced,  anyhow,"  Jen 
nie  admitted.  "I've  hardly  ever  seen  anybody  cry  be 
fore.  I  suppose  I'll  have  to  get  used  to  it." 

She  was,  however,  much  too  experienced  in  the  ways  of 
human  fallibility  to  fall  into  the  error  of  supposing  that 
merely  by  winning  the  opening  skirmish  she  had  estab 
lished,  permanently,  the  sound  sane  relation  with  Joe's 
daughter  which  any  real  help  would  have  to  be  built  upon. 

Trix,  having  hated  her,  whole-heartedly,  started  swing 
ing  now  quite  to  the  other  end  of  the  arc.  Jennie  had  not 
worked  in  the  stenographers'  rooms  of  numerous  big  busi 
ness  offices  without  learning  what  the  sort  of  sentimental 
affection  known  as  a  "crush"  is  like.  She  had,  though 
not  often,  been  made  the  unwilling  recipient  of  attentions 
of  this  sort  and  she  had  always  hated  them,  sensing  their 
fundamental  unhealthiness.  She  couldn't  have  imagined 
herself  reciprocating  an  attachment  of  this  sort.  Yet  now, 
with  Beatrice,  she  was  slow  in  recognizing  the  familiar 
manifestations  as  belonging  in  that  category. 

Trix  began  getting  up  for  breakfast  with  her,  coming  to 
the  table  in  nightgown  and  robe,  pouring  her  coffee,  mak 
ing  her  toast,  superfluously  seeing  to  it  that  everything  was 
exactly  right; — superfluously  because  Joe's  domestic  ser 
vice  was  always  perfect  anyhow.  He  was  one  of  those 


THE  SAMARITANS  275 

men  who  have  the  knack  of  getting  it.  But  the  child  did 
succeed  in  investing  the  utilitarian  meal  with  an  atmos 
phere  which  Jennie  enjoyed,  though  it  was  to  the  detri 
ment  of  the  morning  paper.  Then  she  constituted  her 
self  Jennie's  chauffeur,  driving  her  down-town  every 
morning  with  great  elan  in  the  roadster  and  calling  for  her 
faithfully  every  night;  a  real  inconvenience,  this  was, 
since  Jennie  was  used  to  being  free  to  come  and  go  when 
she  liked.  Yet  she  found  herself  surprisingly  reluctant  to 
rebel  at  it.  And  she  did  enjoy  their  long  rides,  before  or 
after  dinner.  Trix  was  an  amazingly  good  driver,  just  on 
the  hither  side  of  recklessness  and  held  there  by  faultless 
judgment  and  skill. 

"You  ought  to  have  been  an  aviator,"  Jennie  said  once, 
at  the  end  of  a  vivid  ten  seconds  during  which  she'd  held 
her  breath. 

"So  I've  been  told,"  the  girl  remarked,  "by  some  one 
who  ought  to  know."  At  the  end  of  another  mile  she 
made  it  clear  enough  who  this  was.  "George  Burns  was 
a  flyer  in  the  war — practically." 

When  Jennie,  with  a  laugh,  inquired  how  he  could  be 
"practically"  a  flyer  and  not  really  one,  she  explained, 
with  a  certain  degree  of  feeling.  "They  never  gave  the 
enlisted  men  a  dog's  chance  to  get  pilots'  licenses. 
George  was  a  mechanic,  but  he  was  going  up  all  the  time, 
of  course,  and  some  of  his  officers  were  decent  enough  to 
let  him  drive.  Ashamed  not  to,  I  guess,  because  he  was 
better  at  it  than  most  of  them.  He  could  do  all  the  stunts. 
Isn't  it  rotten  that  he  never  could  have  a  chance!  "When 
you  think  of  some  of  the  chumps  that  go  strutting  around 
with  a  pair  of  wings." 

Jennie  didn't  believe,  she  said,  that  many  of  the  men 
with  wings  on  their  blouses  were  chumps,  but  she  agreed, 
without  reservation,  that  it  was  rotten  about  George. 

"Oh,  he  should  worry!"  Trix  exclaimed.  "He's  fly 
ing  now,  all  right.  Got  a  good  job  in  the  air  mail  service." 

Jennie  remembered  her  treaty  and  suppressed  the  ques 
tion  that  was  on  her  tongue,  but  this  restraint  cost  her 


276         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

some  painful  uncertainties.  She  felt  more  doubtful  of 
her  loyalty  to  Joe  during  the  ensuing  hours  than  she'd 
ever  been  before.  She  had  volunteered  nothing  to  Bea 
trice  concerning  the  details  of  Burns'  dismissal,  of  the 
"reward"  Joe  had  paid  him  and  the  condition  attached 
to  it.  Trix  might  very  well  be  ignorant  of  this  whole 
matter,  even  if  she  were  in  communication  (as  she  delib 
erately  had  hinted)  with  the  man.  An  enlightenment  on 
this  point  might  make  a  vital  difference,  both  in  her  feel 
ings  toward  him  and  toward  her  father.  If  George  was 
pretending  to  be  a  martyr  he  ought  to  be  exposed,  forth 
with.  But  Jennie  held  doggedly  to  her  line.  She  owed 
her  present  strong  position  in  Trix's  regard  to  the  way 
she'd  lived  up  to  her  promise  not  to  meddle,  and  she 
wouldn't,  even  at  this  apparently  critical  point,  begin 
meddling  now. 

She  was  rewarded  by  a  measure  of  reassurance  that 
night  before  she  went  to  bed.  She'd  retired  to  her  room, 
got  into  dressing-gown  and  slippers  and  was  belatedly 
reading  the  financial  news  in  the  evening  paper.  This 
had  more  than  an  academic  interest  for  her — she  always 
had  an  iron  or  two  of  her  own  in  LaSalle  Street, — but  she 
was  not  so  absorbed  in  it  that  the  sound  of  Trix's  opening 
door  didn't  instantly  divert  her  attention.  A  moment 
later  the  girl  came  in,  in  her  nightgown,  her  hair  loose 
about  her  shoulders,  thrust  aside  the  paper  and  sat  down 
on  the  arm  of  Jennie's  chair. 

"You're  a  peach,  Jennie,"  she  said.  "And  I'm  a 
pig.  It  was  in  the  paper,  about  George  being  one  of  the 
mail  pilots.  I  thought  I'd  show  it  to  you  when  I  read  it, 
and  then  I  thought  I  wouldn't."  She  gave  a  little  laugh 
and  asked,  "You  didn't  think  I'd  been  going  with  him  on 
the  sly,  did  you?" 

' '  I  supposed  he  'd  written  to  you, ' '  Jennie  admitted.  ' '  I 
never  thought  of  its  being  in  the  paper." 

The  girl  sat  thoughtfully  silent  a  while,  stroking  Jen 
nie's  forearm,  an  absent-minded  impersonal  caress,  much 
like  having  a  kitten  rub  itself  against  your  legs.  Pres- 


THE  SAMARITANS  277 

ently,  though,  the  quality  of  it  changed.  She  took  the 
older  woman  by  the  shoulders  in  a  grip  and  looked  in 
tently  into  her  eyes. 

"You're  the  only  person  in  the  world  who's  like  that," 
she  declared.  "Anybody  else,  the  minute  I  said  that  about 
him,  would  have  thought  of  something  horrid.  And  be 
lieved  it,  too,  as  quick  as  they  thought  of  it.  Dad,  quicker 
than  anybody. — And,  oh,  the  hell  he'd  have  raised  about 
it!" 

"There's  a  reason  for  that,  you  don't  want  to  forget," 
Jennie  reminded  her.  "He — adores  you.  You're  the 
only  thing  in  the  world  he  really  cares  about. ' ' 

Again  there  came  a  change  in  the  look  of  the  girl 's  face, 
in  the  quality  of  her  smile,  in  the  feel  of  her  hands.  She 
slipped  from  the  chair-arm  down  into  Jennie's  lap,  curled 
herself  there  and  went  soft  and  heavy.  "Don't  you  love 
me  a  little  bit,  yourself  ? ' '  she  asked. 

"Oh — say  half  of  that,"  Jennie  replied  contentedly. 
But  at  the  end  of  a  five  minutes'  silence  she  roused  her 
self  bruskly  and  pushed  the  girl  away.  "It's  pretty  near 
one  o'clock,  and  by  half-past  eight  to-morrow  morning 
I  've  got  to  be  somewhere  where  they  expect  me  to  be  worth 
my  salt.  Hun  along  and  let  me  get  some  sleep ! ' ' 

"I'll  drive  you  down,"  Trix  said  through  a  yawn  as 
she  made  her  reluctant  way  toward  the  door. 

"Not  to-morrowT,"  Jennie  answered  decisively.  "I've 
got  to  do  a  lot  of  running  around  during  the  day,  and  I  '11 
want  the  Ford." 

Trix  shot  back  a  quick  look  at  her,  faintly  suspicious  and 
openly  resentful,  a  look  which  Jennie  rewarded  with  a 
laugh.  "Oh,  just  as  you  like,"  the  girl  said,  with  a 
shrug;  "good  night." 

It  was  true  enough;  Jennie  was  going  to  want  her  own 
car,  but  this  was  not  quite  her  whole  reason  for  declining 
Trix 's  offer.  She  had  been  surprised  by  the  force  and  the 
ambiguity  of  what  she  felt  when  the  girl  snuggled  into 
her  arms.  It  left  a  rankling  afterthought  behind  it,  too; 
a  doubt  whether,  after  all,  it  had  been  through  the  news- 


278         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

paper  that  Trix  had  learned  of  George  Burns'  job  in  the 
air  mail.  She  hadn't  explicitly  said  so,  Jennie  remem 
bered,  and  she  felt  the  sting  of  contempt — the  thing  Henry 
Craven  had  talked  about — in  the  prevarication,  if  this 
were  what  it  was.  Yet,  could  she  be  sure  there  was  not,  in 
herself,  a  background  of  jealousy  for  this  suspicion  to 
shine  out  against?  One  thing  was  plain,  anyhow:  the  re 
lation  between  her  and  Beatrice  wanted  an  astringent 
treatment.  And  a  good,  thorough  aeration;  it  was  get 
ting  stuffy. 

Henry  Craven  occurred  to  her  as  a  possible  ally  in  this 
project.  She  had  often  wished  she  might  take  him  in  as 
counselor  upon  some  of  the  problems  her  young  ward 
presented,  but  this  had  never  struck  her  as  quite  feasible 
since  she  couldn  't  take  him  fully  into  her  confidences  with 
out  betraying  both  Joe's  flying  visit  and  Beatrice's  es 
capade.  He  knew  she  had  moved  into  Joe's  flat  for  the 
rest  of  the  term  of  his  absence  to  keep  Trix  company,  but 
she  had  volunteered  no  further  explanations.  What  she 
wanted  of  him  now,  though,  was  not  advice  but  action. 

"I'm  thinking  of  asking  Henry  Craven  to  dinner,"  she 
said  to  Beatrice  one  evening.  "What  do  you  say  to  that?" 

The  answer  was  not  encouraging.  "He's  a  poor  fish. 
"What  do  you  want  him  to  dinner  for?" 

"That's  more  or  less  his  own  idea  of  himself,  but  you're 
both  wrong  about  him. — I  like  him  a  lot." 

"His  own  idea!"  Trix  laughed  contemptuously. 
"Why,  he  doesn't  think  ordinary  air  is  fit  for  him  to 
breathe. — Do  you  want  him  to  improve  me?  So  that  I 
can  learn  to  talk  with  an  English  accent?  De-ah  me!" 

Jennie  admitted,  good-humoredly,  that  any  one  who 
pronounced  "r's"  and  "a's"  the  way  Henry  did  was 
justly  suspect,  but  she  insisted  that  in  this  case  appear 
ances  were  misleading.  "He  isn't — shy,  exactly,  but  he's 
timid.  He  doesn't  think  people  are  interested  in  him.  He 
thinks  they're  laughing  at  him  when  they  aren't  in  the 
least.  It's  that  sour  sister  of  his  that's  done  it  to  him,  I 
think.  He's  been  a  lot  jollier  since  she  went  away.  You 


THE  SAMARITANS  279 

"were  lucky  to  escape  a  summer  with  her.  But  he 's  as  pleas 
ant  and  friendly  as  you  could  want  anybody  to  be. ' ' 

"Has  he  been  going  around  with  you — since  Margaret's 
been  away?" 

Jennie  felt  herself  reddening  with  annoyance  at  the 
tone,  which  was  neither  friendly  nor  pleasant,  but  she 
answered  evenly,  "Oh,  two  or  three  times.  A  dinner  or 
two,  and  a  show.  And  I  think  I'd  like  to  return  the  com 
pliment." 

"Oh,  all  right,"  Beatrice  said  sulkily.  "I  didn't  know 
you  were  getting  silly  about  him." 

Jennie  was  able  to  laugh  at  that.  "If  I  never  get  sil 
lier  about  any  man  than  I  am  about  Henry  .  .  .  But,  Trix, 
I  thought  you  liked  him." 

It  was  one  straw  too  many.  "Did  he  tell  you  that  ? ' '  she 
demanded,  with  a  blaze  of  temper.  "Well,  I'll  tell  you, 
once  for  all,  I  don't.  I  don't  like  him,  nor  his  sister,  nor 
his  nice  little  cousin  Dodo.  I  don't  like  his  holy  airs.  Oh, 
he  makes  me  sick!" 

"Well,  that's  plain  enough,"  Jennie  commented.  "All 
the  same,  I  think  I  '11  invite  him  to  dinner  with  me. ' ' 

"Here?" 

"Naturally  not,  since  you  feel  like  that  about  him  and 
this  is  your  house.  No,  I  '11  take  him  to  one  of  the  hotels  or 
gardens. — To-morrow  night,  I  guess,  if  he's  free." 

The  quarrel  went  no  further  that  evening  and  Jennie 
hoped  that  a  night's  sleep  would  obliterate  it.  She  even 
had  an  olive  branch  ready  in  the  form  of  an  offhand  sug 
gestion  that  Trix  change  her  mind  and  join  the  party. 
But  she  was  allowed  to  eat  breakfast  alone,  and  just  be- 
fort  she  left  the  flat  for  the  office,  the  girl,  looking  like  a 
young  msenad,  stopped  her  in  the  bedroom  corridor. 

"I'm  to  have  a  night  off,  am  I?"  she  asked. 

"Yes,  if  you  want  to  put  it  like  that,"  Jennie  answered 
coolly.  "That  is  unless  Henry  turns  out  to  have  some 
thing  else  to  do.  If  that's  the  case,  shall  I  telephone?" 

"You  mean,  you  don't  care  one  damn  what  I  do — while 
you're  off  with  him?" 


280         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"Why,  yes,  it  comes  to  about  that.  I  mean,  it's  up  to 
you,  what  you  do  with  yourself  to-night,  just  as  it's  been 
from  the  first.  I'm  not  your  keeper  and  I've  never  pre 
tended  to  be." 

This  was,  both  reason  and  instinct  assured  her,  the  only 
possible  line  to  take,  with  the  situation  developed  to  that 
point.  (And  whether  she  might  have  managed  better 
than  to  let  it  get  to  that  point  was  an  academic  question. 
She'd  done  the  best  she  could,  all  along.)  But  she  had  a 
racking  sort  of  day.  And  even  the  evening,  cheered  and, 
indescribably,  comforted  as  it  was  by  Henry's  company, 
was  punctuated  by  twinges  of  misgiving  that  hurt  like  a 
neuralgia. 

They  didn't  talk  very  much  about  Beatrice,  but  he  gave 
her  one  suggestion  that  she  thanked  him  for.  He'd  asked 
what  the  girl  did  with  her  days.  They  must  be  pretty 
long,  he  thought,  for  any  one  with  her  energy.  "It 
wouldn't  surprise  me,"  he  ventured,  "if  she  were  to  turn 
up  an  artistic  talent  of  some  sort.  Joe's  full  of  it,  you 
know.  Think  of  the  music  he  manages  to  hear.  And  the 
pictures  he  buys — just  because  he  can't  resist  them.  She 
said  something  once  that  made  me  think  she  might  take  to 
sculpture  or  painting.  But  almost  anything  of  the  sort 
she  could  learn  to  do  with  her  hands  would  be  an — outlet 
for  her.  Joe's  never  seen  that.  He's  dammed  her  up." 

It  was  a  promising  suggestion,  and  one  Jennie  re 
proached  herself  for  not  having  thought  of  earlier.  If 
it  weren't  too  late  she'd  offer  it,  still, — carefully  conceal 
ing  the  source  of  it.  But  what  chance  had  she,  after  that 
last  furious  warning  that  had  been  launched  after  her — • 
of  finding  the  girl. 

She  stuck  it  out  with  Henry  exactly  as  if  nothing  had 
happened,  and  if  he  saw  anything  queer  about  her  manner 
he  forbore  to  notice  it.  She  drove  home,  after  she'd  left 
him  as  usual  at  his  own  door,  at  her  steady  twenty-two 
miles  an  hour,  put  her  car  in  the  garage  and  let  herself 
into  the  apartment  exactly  in  her  accustomed  manner. 
But  in  her  room,  when  she  saw,  propped  against  her  pin- 


THE  SAMARITANS  281 

cushion,  a  note  addressed  in  Trix's  familiar  scrawl,  she 
had  to  summon  all  her  resolution  for  courage  to  open  it. 

"You  can  ask  Anson  what  I've  been  doing  this  eve 
ning,"  was  all  it  said.  In  an  even  mixture  of  relief  and 
annoyance  she  undressed  and  went  to  bed. 

She'd  hardly  switched  off  the  light,  however,  before 
Beatrice  came  into  her  room.  "I  thought  you'd  either 
ask  Anson  or  else  come  in  and  see  if  I  was  there, ' '  she  said. 
" — I  don't  blame  you  for  being  mad  at  me,  though.  I 
don't  see  how  you  can  stand  me  at  all." 

Jennie  would  have  met  this  advance  half-way  if  she 
could,  but  there  was  no  emotion  in  her  to  respond  to  it. 
Trix  came  and  sat  on  the  edge  of  the  bed  and  told  how 
she'd  done  penance; — gone  to  bed  supperless  at  seven 
o'clock,  after  having  left  orders  that  she  wasn't  to  be 
called  even  to  the  telephone, — no  matter  who  it  was. 

Joe  would  never  have  done  a  thing  like  that,  Jennie 
noted,  but  she  kept  this  reflection  to  herself.  ' '  The  thing 
you  need, ' '  she  said,  rousing  herself  unconsciously  into  her 
down-town  manner,  "is  something  to  do.  Some  sort  of 
real  work  to  do.  That's  the  main  thing  your  father  has 
been  doing  all  his  life.  The  rest  is  never  anything  but 
trimmings.  And  I  hate  to  think  what  would  happen  to 
him  if  he  should  ever  begin  taking  it  easy.  There's  no 
point  in  your  trying  to  earn  money,  I  suppose.  Probably 
he  wouldn't  want  you  to.  But  if  there  was  something 
you  could  study  ...  I  was  wondering  about  the  Art 
Institute.  Have  you  ever  thought  of  that?" 

Trix  pounced  unerringly.  ' '  I  bet  I  know  who  did  think 
of  it.  Henry  Craven.  It's  just  the  sort  of  silly  idea  he'd 
have." 

"Well,  I  didn't  ask  him  for  it,"  Jennie  declared.  "I 
didn't  want  to  talk  about  you  at  all;  nor  think  of  you,  any 
more  than  I  could  help. — You've  given  me  a  devil  of  a  day, 
Trix,  and  that's  the  truth.  What  do  you  suppose  I'd 
have  said  to  Joe,  if  I  'd  come  home  and  found  you  'd — flown 
the  rails?  His  orders  weren't  to  treat  you  the  way  I've 
done.  I  thought  my  way  was  better  and  I  took  a  chance. 


282         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

But   it   wasn't  my  own  money  I  was   speculating  with. 
See?" 

"Wasn't— any  of  it  yours?"     Trix  asked  pathetically. 
"Oh,  go  along  to  bed!"     Jennie  commanded  with  a  re 
luctant  laugh.     "Yes,  of  course,  it  was." 

But  this  was  cleanly  the  end  of  the  sentimental  phase  of 
the  relation.  Trix  didn't  offer  to  resume  her  duties  as 
chauffeur  nor  as  ministrant  at  the  breakfast  table.  After 
a  day  or  two  she  did  begin  appearing  at  breakfast  before 
Jennie  left,  but  very  brisk  and  businesslike  and  visibly 
occupied  with  her  own  affairs.  It  didn't  seem  to  Jennie, 
either,  that  the  girl  was  trying  to  tease  her  into  asking 
what  she  was  up  to. 

What  seemed  a  little  more  like  a  deliberate  stimulus  to 
her  curiosity  was  a  letter  Trix  wrote,  the  evening  of  the 
first  of  these  days,  on  Jennie's  Corona,  during  the  writing 
of  which  she  asked  Jennie  how  you  spelled  Pasadena. 
"You'd  think  I'd  know  how  to  spell  it  after  all  these 
years,"  she  remarked  with  a  laugh.  "I've  had  to  write 
it  before,  of  course,  but  not  when  it  mattered  whether  I 
spelled  it  right  or  not." 

The  knowledge  that  she  was  writing  a  letter  to  Pasa 
dena  of  some  special  sort  which  had  to  be  correctly  spelled, 
would  certainly  have  startled  Joe,  and  it  gave  Jennie 
something  to  think  about,  but  she  asked  no  questions. 
Trix  asked  her  for  some  money,  too,  in  a  bigger  lump  than 
she  usually  wanted,  a  hundred  and  fifty  dollars,  and  Jen 
nie  wrote  her  the  check,  not  feeling  at  all  sure  whether  she 
was  playing  the  part  of  a  wise  woman  or  a  misguided  fool. 

Nothing  untoward  happened,  however.  Trix  gave  a 
standing  order  for  her  car  at  eight  o'clock  every  morning 
and  bolted  her  breakfast  if  necessary  to  enable  her  to  leave 
at  this  hour.  She  drove  herself;  rarely,  Anson  volun 
teered,  came  home  for  lunch,  and  read,  as  a  rule,  in  the 
evening  in  an  absorption  which  contrasted  strongly  with 
her  former  restlessness;  acted,  Jennie  thought,  like  a  per 
son  who  had  really  taken  a  line  of  her  own. 

After  a  week  of  this  she  revealed  her  mystery.     "I 


THE  SAMARITANS  283 

wanted  to  see  whether  I  liked  it  or  not  before  I  said  any 
thing,  that's  all,"  she  told  Jennie.  " — Why,  I'm  going 
to  school.  You  see,  when  you  told  me  I  ought  to  do  some- 
tiling — take  lessons,  you  know,  the  only  thing  I  could 
think  of  that  I  wanted  to  go  on  taking  lessons  in  was  swim 
ming.  That  sounds  kind  of  silly,  I  know,  but  it's  so. 
There 's  a  peach  of  a  swimming  teacher  I  'd  heard  of  at  the 
gym  out  in  Evanston,  so  I  went  to  see  him  about  it.  But 
it  seems  that  the  gym  is  part  of  Northwestern  University, 
and  except  in  summer  he  doesn't  give  lessons,  only  to 
students  in  the  university. 

"Any  sort  of  student  would  do,  though;  you  didn't  have 
to  study  Latin  or  mathematics,  so  I  went  around  to  the 
office  to  see  what  kind  of  student  I  wanted  to  be.  They've 
got  a  special  school  there,  School  of  Speech,  they  call  it, 
and  I  thought  that  would  be  pretty  good  for  me.  Every 
body  laughs  at  the  way  I  talk,  anyhow.  So  I  planked 
down  my  hundred  and  fifty  and  wrote  a  letter  to  the  High 
School  at  Pasadena  to  send  word  on  that  I'd  really  grad 
uated, — and  there  I  am.  I  like  the  school  even  better  than 
the  swimming.  They  teach  you  a  lot  of  interesting  things ; 
acting,  dancing  and  so  on.  Physical  education,  they  call  it. 
Things  that  are  some  earthly  good  to  you !  I  'm  going  to  be 
good  at  it,  too. — Shew  'em  a  few  things!  You  watch." 

This,  at  first  blush,  seemed  to  Jennie  to  solve  all  prob 
lems  at  a  stroke.  Her  efforts  and  those  of  Henry  Craven, 
to  act  as  good  Samaritans,  hadn't  amounted  to  much.  It 
was  the  girl  herself  who,  having  fallen  among  thieves,  had 
picked  herself  up,  tied  up  her  own  wounds,  and  set  her 
self  upon  her  way. 

There  were  still  plenty  of  adverse  chances  to  be  reckoned 
with;  a  momentary  discouragement,  a  succession  of  dull 
days,  a  wayward  impulse  to  a  lark,  a  flare  of  temper  at 
an  unimaginative  touch  of  discipline,  and  the  whole  enter 
prise  might  go  up  in  smoke.  The  child  had  no  code,  nor 
harness  of  habit  to  steady  her  through  a  bit  of  hard  going. 
Yet  the  point  about  which  most  of  Jennie's  apprehen 
sions  clustered  was  Joe's  return.  What  line  would  lie 


284         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

take  with  his  daughter?  Would  he  be  content  to  keep 
hands  off,  to  leave  her  reticences  unforced?  Would  it  be 
possible  for  him  to  keep  in  mind  how  like  him,  at  twenty, 
Beatrice  was?  Would  Jennie  help  matters  much  by  re 
minding  him,  scolding  him,  interfering?  Mightn't  he  be 
jealous  of  her  ascendency  over  the  girl? 

No  use  worrying  about  it,  of  course!  She'd  have  to 
wait  and  see  what  happened. 

5 

Meanwhile,  it  had  got  into  October  and  Joe  kept  postpon 
ing  his  return  from  the  Northwest.  For  weeks  his  reports 
had  been  full  of  material  for  enthusiasm.  All  the  ma 
chinery  for  processing  the  flax  was  installed  and  in  order. 
They  had  begun  working  the  retted  straw.  It  was  going 
through  without  a  hitch.  There  were  some  improvements 
in  the  direction  of  economy  and  simplification  which 
could  profitably  be  made,  but  they  had  turned  up  no 
serious  defects. 

Williamson  and  the  Corbetts  had  begun  showing 
symptoms  of  an  enlivened  interest;  took  to  dropping 
in  at  the  office  to  see  the  samples  which  Joe  was 
sending  down,  in  greater  bulk  from  week  to  week,  for  test 
ing  in  the  laboratory,  and  the  finished  products  that  came 
out  of  it.  They  had  equipped  the  laboratory,  by  now,  un 
der  the  charge  of  a  new  technical  man,  as  a  mill  with 
spinning  machinery  and  looms;  all  the  equivalents,  on  a 
reduced  scale,  for  commercial  linen  manufacture — and 
the  way  the  stuff  came  through  these  searching  tests  was 
well  beyond  the  more  conservative  of  their  expectations; 
— not  far  short,  indeed,  of  Joe's  glowing  prophecies. 

But  this  was  only  the  beginning  of  it.  Interest  in  the 
new  process,  excitement  over  the  prospect  it  offered  of 
finding  a  fortune  in  the  worthless  straw  of  seed  flax, 
was  spreading  over  the  Northwest  country  like  a  prairie 
fire.  Groups  of  local  capitalists  were  coming  almost 
daily  to  visit  the  four  mills.  The  organization  of  sub 
sidiary  companies  was  already  getting  beyond  the  talking 


THE  SAMARITANS  285 

stage.  Money,  itself,  was  beginning  to  talk.  Capital  was 
being  subscribed.  By  the  time  next  year's  crop  came  in, 
three  states  would  be  dotted  with  little  four-thousand-ton 
mills  producing  raw  linen  under  the  Greer  process. 

To  the  financiers'  startled  reminder  that  their  original 
program  had  not  contemplated  going  as  fast  as  this,  Joe's 
replies  were  more  confident  and  urgent  than  ever.  Now 
was  the  time  to  strike.  Everybody  was  ready ;  confidence 
was  running  high  everywhere.  If  they  bestirred  them 
selves,  seized  the  opportunity  at  the  flood,  they  could  re 
pay  the  whole  investment  in  the  enterprise  out  of  the  first 
year's  profits,  and  be  on  velvet  thereafter.  Joe  was  irre 
sistible  in  the  phase.'  He  had  taken  the  bit  in  his  teeth,  but 
it  wasn  't  possible  to  say  he  was  running  wild.  The  figures 
and  the  facts,  as  well  as  the  temper  of  the  country,  were 
going  along  with  him.  The  great  post-war  boom  was  at 
its  height  during  the  summer  and  autumn  of  1919. 

And  then,  one  day,  when  expectation  was  looking  its 
rosiest,  a  letter  came  into  the  office  that  produced  a 
panic.  It  was  from  a  firm  of  patent  lawyers,  one  of  the 
be«t  established  and  most  formidable  in  the  city,  and  it 
served  formal  warning  that  Joe's  process  in  general  and 
much  of  his  machinery  in  particular,  infringed  the  prior 
patents  of  a  client.  All  manufacture  and  sale  of  linen 
under  the  Greer  process  would  henceforth  be  carried  on 
9*  the  peril  of  the  Greer  Company. 

Jennie,  to  whom  the  letter  was  brought  as  soon  as  it 
was  opened,  took  a  few  minutes  for  intense  reflection 
upon  its  startling  contents  before  she  'carried  it  to  Henry. 
For  a  month  after  Joe's  flying  visit  she'd  kept  an  alert 
eye  for  the  "unexpected"  thing  she  was  instantly  to  com 
municate  to  Williamson — or,  in  his  absence,  Corbett,  but 
nothing  had  turned  up  which  was  not  foreseen  by  the 
adopted  policy  of  the  company  and  she  had  ceased  look 
ing  for  it.  It  had  been,  very  likely,  no  more  than  one  of 
Joe's  many  fancies  that  never  took  form.  He  seldom  took 
the  trouble  to  inform  her  of  the  abandonment  of  his  pro 
jects;  in  many  cases  forgot  he'd  ever  entertained  them. 


286         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

The  sudden  looming  of  trouble  over  the  patents  was 
certainly  unexpected,  but  was  it  the  unexpected  thing 
he'd  had  in  mind?  Wasn't  it,  on  its  face,  a  thing  he  could 
not  have  foreseen,  and  one  that  for  a  dozen  reasons  he 
might  wish  to  be  informed  of  before  "Williamson  and  Cor- 
bett — or  even  Henry — knew  it  had  arisen? 

She  found  herself  sitting  with  fists  clenched  and  brows 
drawn  down  tight,  and  mechanically  she  relaxed  and 
lighted  herself  a  cigarette.  Let  her  recall  the  circum 
stances  in  which  Joe  had  instructed  her.  It  had  struck  her 
as  likely,  she  remembered,  that  he  had  made  that  secret 
trip  to  Chicago  for  the  single  purpose  of  saying  that  one 
thing;  which  meant,  if  this  was  a  good  guess,  that  he  re 
garded  it  as  too  important,  and  too  confiden 
tial,  to  be  risked  in  a  letter.  What  made  it 
so  important?  "Wouldn't  she,  naturally,  in  the  face 
of  anything  as  startling  as  this,  take  it  to  Henry 
at  once?  And  wouldn't  Henry  be  sure  to  tell  John  Will 
iamson  about  it  without  delay?  Of  course! — Unless  it 
happened  to  be  a  thing  of  such  a  complexion  that  her  loy 
alty  to  Joe,  and  perhaps  even  Henry's,  would  incline  them 
to  keep  quiet  about  it  until  he  could  be  forewarned.  Un 
less,  in  other  words,  it  was  a  thing  exactly  like  this !  She 
let  go  a  long  expiration  of  relief,  and  carried  the  letter  to 
Henry. 

"We'd  better  try  to  telephone  Joe,  hadn't  we?"  he 
said,  at  the  end  of  a  moment  of  blank  astonishment. 
1 '  That  '11  be  quicker  and  surer  than  telegraphing. ' ' 

"It  might  take  us  all  day  to  find  him,"  Jennie  pointed 
out,  "and  when  we  did,  there  wouldn't  be  anything  he 
could  do  but  come  home  and  talk  it  over  with  Mr.  Will 
iamson  and  Mr.  Corbett.  I  think  we  ought  to  tell  them 
first — one  of  them,  anyway.  Then,  if  they  want  Joe  to 
come  home  for  a  conference,  they  can  send  for  him.  I 
don't  think  we  ought  to  lose  a  minute  letting  them  know 
about  it." 

"Unless,"  Henry  argued  dubiously,  "you  think  it's 
something  Joe  would  like  to  know  about,  first. ' ' 


THE  SAMARITANS  287 

A  luminous  conviction  broke  over  Jennie  that  she'd 
taken  the  right  tack.  "Oh,  I'm  sure  it's  nothing  like 
that,"  she  said. 

The  financiers  decided  that  they  did  want  Joe  and  he 
was  sent  for  the  next  day,  but  they  didn't  waste  time 
waiting  for  him.  They  retained,  in  addition  to  the  firm 
that  had  drawn  Joe's  patents,  a  glittering  specialist  in  the 
field,  and  they  called  Rodney  Aldrich  into  consultation  to 
cover  any  legal  questions  which  might  possibly  lie  outside 
the  technical  area  of  the  case.  By  the  time  Joe  arrived, 
three  days  later,  the  decks  were  cleared,  if  not  for  action 
at  least  for  conference  of  the  weightier  sort. 

Jennie  tried  to  make  an  opportunity  for  a  talk  with  him 
before  the  first  meeting  took  place  but  did  not  succeed  in 
bringing  it  about.  She  got  a  good  look  at  him,  which  told 
her  nothing,  a  painfully  vigorous  handshake,  answered 
his,  "You  and  Trix  getting  on  all  right?"  with  an  af 
firmative  nod,  and  by  that  time  the  other  conferees  were 
straggling  into  the  room.  Everything  else,  including  any 
sort  of  intimation  whether  or  not  she'd  done  right  in  this 
present  business,  had  to  stand  over. 

The  greeting  between  him  and  John  Williamson  was 
worth  watching ;  in  form  it  was  friendly  enough,  but  both 
men  bristled  at  it.  She  wondered,  suddenly,  as  they  took 
their  places,  whether  this  move  might  not  have  originated 
in  the  banker's  camp,  the  first  in  the  campaign  which  Joe 
had  prophesied  would  be  launched  against  him.  It  was 
his  unconcealed  wariness,  his  poker  face,  that  suggested 
this  surprising  idea.  They'd  all  be  able  to  see  that  he 
suspected  something. 

His  disposition,  at  the  outset,  was  to  minimize  the 
danger  from  the  threatened  attack,  though  he  never  tried 
to  deny  that  it  deserved  to  be  considered  seriously.  He 
didn't  believe  any  of  the  mechanical  infringements 
amounted  to  a  damn.  If  there  were  any  coincidences  he 
could  design  around  them.  If  their  more  basic  claims 
showed  interferences,  his  offhand  advice  would  be  to  go 
ahead  and  let  the  other  side  worry.  The  Lord  knew  that, 


288         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

with  the  mess  the  patent  situation  was  in  in  the  United 
States,  nobody  with  capital  behind  him  need  hesitate  about 
infringing  to  his  heart 's  content,  even  in  a  clear  case.  And 
no  case  could  remain  clear  very  long,  while  a  bunch  of 
Federal  judges  with  less  mechanical  knowledge  or  in 
stinct  than  an  average  boy  of  twelve  had  the  deciding  of 
it.  Start  two  units  to  decide  the  same  question  in  two 
jurisdictions  and  you  had  a  good  chance  to  get  two  diamet 
rically  opposed  decisions — equally  authoritative.  As  it 
looked  to  Joe,  the  important  thing  to  look  into  was  not  the 
merit  of  their  opponent's  claims,  but  his  motives  and  the 
extent  of  his  financial  resources ;  in  other  words,  how  hard 
it  would  be,  and  how  long  it  would  take,  to  tire  him  out. 

This  was,  crudely,  about  the  line  Jennie  would  have  ex 
pected  the  financiers  to  take,  but  she  saw  that,  put  as  it 
was,  they  didn't  find  it  palatable.  Aldrich  was  staring 
out  the  window,  his  fingers  drumming  the  table ;  "William 
son  drawing  meaningless  nervous  designs  on  a  scratch 
pad.  It  was  Corbett  who  answered,  the  others  mutely 
signifying  approval  while  he  spoke. 

They  wouldn't  for  one  moment  consider  an  act  of  high 
way  robbery,  even  if  their  immunity  were  as  great  as 
Greer  seemed  to  think  it  was.  But  there  were  a  good 
many  cases,  on  recent  record,  where  powerful  corporations 
had  attempted  to  follow  this  course  and  had  very  justly 
been  compelled  to  reimburse  their  intended  victims  to  the 
tune,  sometimes,  of  millions.  This,  however,  was  be 
side  the  mark.  If  they  had  taken — innocently,  he  assumed 
— ideas  or  processes  which  were  the  patented  property  of 
some  one  else,  rich  or  poor,  they'd  pay  him  what  those 
ideas  were  fairly  worth.  Offer  to  pay,  at  least.  Of 
course,  if  the  patentee  had  exorbitant  notions  of  their 
value,  refused  to  listen  to  reason,  tried  to  hold  them  up, 
why  then  the  tactics  Mr.  Greer  had  outlined  would  have 
his  full  approval.  But  obviously,  the  first  thing  to 
settle  was  the  purely  technical  question  as  to  the  merit 
and  the  value — including  the  nuisance  value — of  their 
opponent's  invention. 


THE  SAMARITANS  289 

Joe  agreed  at  once.  He  hadn't  meant  to  say  he  didn't 
favor  taking  up  the  technical  question  first.  He  had  a 
very  lively  personal  interest  in  it,  if  only  for  the  purpose 
of  finding  out  why  their  own  investigation  of  the  files, 
his  search,  and  the  independent  one  which  Corbett  and 
Williamson  had  had  made,  had  failed  to  turn  up  this  al 
leged  interference. 

Corbett 's  patent  lawyer  made  an  openly  apologetic  ex 
planation  of  this.  The  rival  process  was  one  of  an  enor 
mous  freak  class  for  the  industrial  utilization  of  corn 
stalks.  The  file-wrapper  and  contents  had  had  a  cursory; 
examination,  but  the  serious  claims  were  buried  under  a 
mass  of  others  so  fantastic  that  their  purport  hadn't  been 
detected. 

Joe  let  off  one  of  his  characteristic  explosions  at  this 
point.  He  'doubted  if  there  were  a  dozen  men  in  the 
country  who  could  be  trusted  to  read  a  blue-print  prop 
erly.  To  a  decently  educated  engineer  the  purport  of  any 
diagram  ought  to  be  as  instantly  apparent  as  the  purport 
of  the  seven  of  spades.  "They  blunder  them  out,"  he 
fumed,  "like  children  mispronouncing  hard  words!  Let's 
have  a  look  at  the  stuff,"  he  concluded.  "You've  got  it 
here,  haven't  you?  I  don't  believe,  yet,  that  there's  any 
thing  in  it." 

But  it  soon  became  plain  to  Jennie — and  to  the  others, 
she  couldn't  but  suppose — that  this  opinion  of  his  was 
seriously  shaken  by  the  diagrams  and  descriptions  that 
were  spread  before  him.  He  studied  them  with  deepening 
seriousness,  his  dark  face  now  intent,  now  abstracted,  now 
illuminated  by  a  gleam  of  rueful  appreciation.  At  last, 
with  a  sigh,  he  pushed  them  away  from  him.  "There's 
no  use  detaining  you  gentlemen  any  longer  to-day,"  he 
said.  "I  shall  want  to  put  in  a  night's  work  on  this  be 
fore  I  shall  have  an  opinion  that's  worth  giving.  Offhand, 
some  of  it  looks  good.  I  hope  it  isn't  so  good  as  it  looks. 
There  are  some  minor  points  where  his  stuff  is  better  than 
mine,  obviously;  and  one  or  two  that  aren't  so  damned 
minor.  Anyhow,  by  to-morrow  morning  I'll  be  able  to 


290         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

tell  you  pretty  near  what  we're  up  against.  Will  eleven 
o'clock  suit  everybody?" 

Jennie  lingered  after  the  rest  had  gone.  She  hoped 
for  a  sign;  not  a  detailed  explication  of  his  mind — it 
wasn't  like  Joe,  in  the  heat  of  battle,  to  indulge  his  lieu 
tenants  so  far — but  a  burst  of  profanity,  or  the  gleam  of 
a  grin,  from  which  she  could  draw  her  own  conclusions 
whether  or  not  this  thing  was  a  trap,  and,  if  a  trap,  of 
whose  setting;  whether,  first  of  all,  she'd  done  right  in 
treating  it  as  the  "unexpected"  thing  he'd  forewarned 
her  of.  But  she  got  nothing  of  the  sort.  His  abstraction 
didn't  lift. 

He  smiled,  presently,  and  nodded  her  to  a  chair.  "Let's 
hear  all  about  things,"  he  commanded. 

"Business  or  personal?"  she  asked. 

"Business,  hell!  How've  things  been  going  at  home? 
What's  the  girl  been  doing  with  herself?  Giving  you  any 
trouble?  You've  been  damn  uncommunicative,  seems  to 
me.  I  don't  believe  you've  written  me  about  her,  once." 

"No,  I  haven't,"  she  began,  but  he  had  unhooked  his 
telephone  and  she  waited  to  see  what  he  was  going  to  do. 
He  called  the  number  of  his  flat  and  flung  Jennie  an  ex 
planation  while  he  waited. 

"I'll  just  say  hello  to  Trix,  now,"  lie  said.  "Get  her 
to  come  down  here  to  dinner  with  me,  I  guess.  I  can  leave 
this  mess  long  enough  for  that.  Wish  I  didn't  have  to 
work  all  night." 

"I  don't  believe  you  11  find  her  there  as  early  as  this," 
Jennie  remarked  with  a  look  at  her  watch.  "She  spoke 
of  waiting  for  you,  but  I  couldn't  tell  her  when  you  were 
coming  exactly,  so  she  decided  not  to." 

"If  she  isn't  at  home,  where  is  she?"  he  asked,  but  got 
his  connection  before  she  could  answer.  "Tell  her  to 
call  me  up  at  my  office  the  minute  she  comes  in,"  he 
ordered,  and  hung  up.  "You  know  where  she  is,  don't 
you?"  he  shot  at  Jennie. 

"Not  exactly,"  she  admitted.  "Of  course  that  means 
I  don't  really  know  at  all.  I  haven't  kept  track  of  her 


THE  SAMARITANS  291 

like  that;  haven't  tried  to. — I'd  better  tell  you  from  the 
beginning.  The  reason  I  didn't  write  to  you  about  her 
was  because  I  promised  her  I  wouldn't.  And  I  promised, 
at  the  same  time,  not  to  ask  her  any  questions,  nor  to 
question  any  one  else  about  her.  That  was  about  three 
days  after  you  left,  when  I  saw  that  anything  else  would 
be  perfectly  hopeless." 

"That's  a  damned  funny  way  of  carrying  out  my  in 
structions,"  he  commented. 

"I  wasn't  trying  to  carry  out  your  instructions.  I 
never  told  you  I  would.  I  said  I  'd  do  the  best  I  could  for 
the  girl,  and  I've  done  it  my  own  way.  It  wasn't  by  being 
a  spy,  or  a  governess,  or  any  of  the  things  a  girl  like  Trix 
would  be  sure  to  hate.  And  it's  worked,  Joe. — No,  you 
give  me  a  chance  to  tell  you  about  it!" — He  relinquished 
the  intended  interruption  with  no  very  good  grace  and 
sat  back  in  his  chair  again. 

Against  the  gloomy  abstraction  of  his  look  she  found  it 
hard  to  hit  upon  the  beginning  she  wanted  for  her  story. 
She  plunged,  finally,  into  the  middle  of  it.  ' '  She 's  going 
to  school,  Joe.  Up  in  Northwestern  University.  It  was 
her  own  idea  from  the  start.  She  picked  out  what  she 
wanted,  registered  and  paid  her  tuition ;  wrote  out  to  Pasa 
dena  for  her  certificate  from  the  high  school — all  before 
she  told  me  a  thing  about  it.  She's  working  hard,  and 
she's  happy  at  it.  She  drives  off  at  eight  o'clock  every 
morning  as  regular  as  the  clock,  and  what  with  some  of 
the  extra  things  she's  taking — swimming  lessons  and  all 
— she's  hardly  ever  home  much  before  dinner.  And  she 
studies  at  night.  She's  been  doing  it  now  for  nearly  a 
month." 

"What's  she  studying?"  he  asked,  and  seemed  un 
favorably  impressed  by  the  list  Jennie  endeavored  to  fur 
nish  him  with.  "What  sort  of  reports  does  she  get!" 
Jennie  had  seen  none;  no,  not  even  of  attendance.  What 
were  her  teachers  like?  The  swimming  teacher,  for  in 
stance?  Had  Jennie  talked  with  any  of  them? — No,  she 
hadn't.  The  swimming  teacher  was  supposed  to  be  the 


JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

best  man  at  it  in  this  part  of  the  country.  At  least,  so 
Beatrice  regarded  him. 

"She  admits  he's  a  man,  does  she?  Look  here,  Jennie! 
How  do  you  know  she's  doing  anything  but  swimming? 
How  do  you  know  she's  going  to  school  at  all?  How  do 
you  know  anything  except  that  she  drives  off  in  the  car 
every  morning — by  herself,  I  suppose — and  stays  away  all 
day  ?  How  do  you  know  she  isn  't  running  with  "Ware  and 
his  lot?  Or  with  George  Burns,  for  that  matter?  She 
may  be  picking  him  up  on  some  drug-store  corner  every 
other  afternoon." 

"She  may,"  Jennie  admitted.  "I  haven't  any  alibi  for 
her.  But  she  doesn't  act,  to  me,  as. if  that  was  the  sort 
of  thing  she  was  doing.  She  doesn't  have  to  lie  to  me  and 
she  tells  me  a  different  story.  She's  made  friends  with 
me,  you  see.  Make  friends  with  her,  yourself,  and  then 
see  what  you  think." 

"Make  friends  with  her!"  he  cried,  deeply  affronted. 
"Why,  my  God,  Jennie,  I  love  that  child  as  I  never  loved 
anything  before  in  the  world.  But  that  wasn't  enough  to 
keep  her  safe.  She  needs  somebody  to  watch  her.  I  left 
that  job  to  you. — And  it  seems  to  me  you've  fallen  down 
on  it. 

"I'm  not  blaming  you,"  he  added,  misreading  her  ges 
ture  of  despair  over  his  wrong-headedness.  "She  doesn't 
mean  much  to  you,  compared  to  what  she  means  to  me. 
You  can  afford  to  take  chances.  But  I  can't.  Not  after 
that  night  Burns  brought  her  home.  She'd  been  out  all 
the  night  before,  Jennie,  with  that  rotten  drunken  gang. 
Anything  could  have  happened  to  her." 

"You  promised  to  let  that  be  bygones,"  she  reminded 
him. 

"And  I  will,"  he  asserted,  "as  far  as  she's  concerned. 
I  '11  never  speak  of  it  again  to  her.  Never  ask  her  a  ques 
tion.  But  I  can't  help  thinking  about  it,  can  I?  Won 
dering  what  did  happen  to  her?  She  swore  she  was  all 
right.  Nothing's  happened  since — has  there — to  make 
you  think  .  .  . " 


THE  SAMARITANS  293 

"For  God's  sake,  Joe,"  she  broke  in  upofi  him,  "drop 
it!  You're  all  wrong.  You're  talking  like  a  sentimental 
idiot.  If  you  take  that  line  with  her  when  you  see  her, 
you  '11  do  her  a  lot  more  harm,  yourself,  than  was  done  her 
that  night — even  supposing  she  did  lose  her  innocence!" 

His  only  answer  was  an  incredulous  stare. 

"All  right,"  she  went  on ;  "be  as  shocked  as  you  like !  I 
mean  you  to  be.  I'm  trying  to  wake  you  up.  Innocence 
is  a  good  thing  to  have,  but  it  isn't  the  only  thing  in  the 
world.  You'd  lost  yours  long  before  you  were  as  old 
as  she  is.  In  more  ways  than  you  mean  about  her. 
You'd  run  amuck.  You'd  got  down,  you've  often  told  me, 
to  the  the  edge  of  the  gutter.  You're  proud  of  it,  too! 
Because  of  the  way  you  built  yourself  up  from,  there.  By 
yourself.  Without  any  help  from  anybody. 

"Well,  she's  like  you.  You've  said  that  yourself,  but  I 
told  you  you'd  never  be  able  to  remember  it.  She's  got 
to  find  things  out  for  herself,  even  if  she  gets  hurt,  now 
and  then,  doing  it.  Nobody  can  help  her  unless  they  begin 
by  trusting  her  to  find  her  own  way.  And  if  she  sees  that 
you  don 't ; — finds  you  watching  her  and  spying  on  her — 
it'll  do  her  more  harm  than  any  drunken  lover  could  do 
her  at  the  end  of  a  joy-ride.  I  mean  that,  Joe ;  literally. ' ' 

His  only  answer,  for  the  moment,  was  to  say  that  he 
wouldn't  have  believed  a  woman — a  good  woman — could 
have  talked  like  that. 

She  uttered  a  mirthless  laugh.  "I  don't  believe  you 
know  much  about  good  women.  I  doubt  if  you  know  one 
when  you  see  one." 

"I'm  not  going  north  again,"  he  said,  after  a  heavy 
silence.  "There  were  a  few  things  I  wanted  to  finish  up 
but  they  can  stand  over.  I've  got  a  job  here,  I  can  see 
that.  I  couldn't  expect  anybody  else  to  do  it  for  me. 
She's  my  daughter,  that's  the  difference.  I'm  going  to 
look  after  her  my  own  way.  I  don't  mean  to  spy  on  her. 
She  won't  know  I'm  watching  or  asking  questions.  But 
I'm  going  to  know!" 

"She'll  see  through  you  like  so  much  glass,"  Jennie 


294         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

predicted  bitterly.  "She  hasn't  got  your  wits  for  noth 
ing.  But  she's  your  daughter,  as  you  say." 

The  note  of  finality  in  her  voice  made  him  look  up  at 
her  quickly,  with  another  assurance  that  he  didn't  blame 
her  for  seeing  the  thing  the  way  she  had  nor  for  acting 
according  to  her  lights.  He  hoped  she  'd  go  on  giving  him 
advice  about  the  girl,  helping  where  she  could.  Above  all, 
he  hoped  she'd  stay  on  with  them  in  the  flat. 

But  this  she  wouldn't  consider.  "Two  people  trying 
to  do  the  same  thing  in  opposite  ways  are  sure  to  make  a 
mess  of  it — even  if  either  one  of  them  could  have  done  it 
alone.  No,  I  '11  pull  out,  Joe,  and  leave  the  wheel  to  you. — 
Of  course  I'm  not  hurt  about  it!  It'll  seem  pretty  good, 
I  tell  you,  to  be  back  in  my  old  joint  again.  When  you've 
been  a  hermit  as  long  as  I  have,  you  sort  of  need  to  be  by 
yourself. ' ' 

She  may,  at  the  moment,  have  talked  herself  into  a  half 
belief  that  this  was  true,  but  it  was  not  a  conviction  with 
stamina  enough  to  last  out  her  first  evening  alone  in  her 
flat.  She  was  miserably  lonely.  She  wanted  Trix,  rang 
ing  in,  hugging  her  at  haphazard,  sprawling  on  the  chair- 
arm  or  the  rug,  talking  neither  very  wisely  nor  very  wit 
tily,  at  random,  yawning,  fondling  her  shoulder  or  her 
knee  for  a  moment  with  a  careless  hand,  and  saying  she 
was  going  to  bed.  Naive,  pathetic,  lovely,  young,  just 
beginning  to  find  herself!  "What  right  had  Joe  to  come 
trampling  into  this  little  garden,  just  because  a  momen 
tary  casual  act  of  his,  forgotten  for  twenty  years,  had 
begotten  her!  His  daughter,  was  she? 

6 

Their  conferences  over  the  patent  situation  endured  for 
days.  The  lawyers  studied  Joe's  report  with  grave  at 
tention  and  presented  a  report  of  their  own.  To  the 
bored  laymen  sitting  round  the  table  each  of  these  re 
ports  made  the  situation  the  more  labyrinthine.  The  al 
leged  infringements  raised  curious  questions  of  law  as 
well  as  of  fact.  Rodney  Aldrich  enthusiastically  declared 


THE  SAMARITANS  295 

it  a  fascinating  problem — a  dictum  which,  coming  from 
him,  made  the  others  of  them  shudder. 

John  Williamson  put  an  end  to  this  phase  of  the  dis 
cussion  by  declaring  that  if  their  own  experts  were  as 
dubious  as  all  this,  it  was  clear  the  other  side  had  better 
be  bought  off  without  further  delay.  All  the  non-tech 
nical  people  around  the  table  agreed  with  him,  and,  with 
this,  the  discussion  shifted  to  the  question  of  tactics. 
John  was  in  favor  of  a  cold  offer,  liberal  enough  to  be 
attractive,  but  accompanied  by  the  stiffest  bluff  they 
could  make  that  the  alternative  to  its  acceptance  was  a 
fight  to  the  finish. 

"Take  time  to  look  'em  up,  first,"  Joe  insisted.  "You 
don't  know  yet  what '11  be  attractive  to  them.  My  expe 
rience  is  that  if  a  man  expects  twenty-five  dollars  and  you 
offer  him  two  hundred  he'll  refuse  it  and  sue  you  for 
fifty  thousand."  This  was  sound  observation,  they  all 
agreed. 

"Get  a  line  on  the  inventor  himself,"  Joe  went  on. 
"Find  out  who's  backing  him.  I'll  tell  you  frankly  that 
I've  taken  measures,  on  my  own  account,  to  get  a  line  on 
him,  and  until  I'm  satisfied  that  my  line  goes  all  the  way 
round  and  ties  in  a  knot,  I  won't  vote  for  paying  him  a 
cent."  (Did  he  suspect,  Jennie  wondered,  that  this  in 
ventor  was  a  pawn  in  John  "Williamson's  game?  There 
was  an  edge  in  his  voice  which  suggested  he  did.)  "If 
he 's  what  he  looks  like,  so  far,  we  can  buy  him  up  so  cheap 
we'll  feel  foolish." 

But  it  turned  out  that  Joe  was  wrong  in  that.  The  in 
ventor  was  skilfully  stalked,  sounded  out,  impressed,  and 
eventually  was  offered  the  sum  in  cold  cash  which,  after 
so  much  deliberation,  had  been  agreed  upon.  The  offer, 
through  his  attorneys,  was  instantly  rejected  and  a  coun 
ter-proposal  submitted  wilich  consternated  the  directors. 
The  cash  price  of  the  patents  was  prohibitive,  fantastic, 
and  the  alternative  offer  was  a  substantial  block  of  stock 
in  the  Greer  company.  The  inventor  believed  that  the 
Greer  process,  improved  by  his  own,  had  enormous  possi- 


296         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

bilities.  He  wished  to  be  in  on  it.  He  had  deliberately 
put  his  cash  price  at  a  prohibitive  figure  because  the 
stock  was  what  he  really  wanted. 

Joe,  from  the  moment  this  offer  was  made,  favored  re 
jecting  both  alternatives  of  it,  and  fighting  it  out  with  the 
idiot  through  the  courts.  The  question  was  not  worth  de 
bating,  and  anybody  who  saw  a  need  for  debating  it  was 
either  lacking  in  courage — or  had  his  own  fish  to  fry. 

He  was  called  sharply  to  order  for  this  insinuation,  and 
Jennie  was  nnhappily  aware  that  the  explosion  had  not 
furthered  his  cause.  It  might  have  made  some  impression 
on  Williamson,  she  thought,  but  never  on  men  like  Cor- 
bett  and  Crawford.  Their  jaws  set  ominously  over  it.  It 
was  still  the  sense  of  the  directors  that  an  arrangement 
should  be  made.  Crawford  made  a  formal  motion  that  the 
settlement  be  made,  when  it  was  made,  in  stock. 

This  put  Joe  in  a  corner.  Real  danger  always  quieted 
him,  and  his  argument  though  forcible  was  low-voiced  and 
conciliatory.  The  fundamental  difficulty  about  organiz 
ing  this  company,  he  pointed  out,  had  been  over  the  ques 
tion  of  control.  He  had  felt  at  first,  that  since  he  was  put 
ting  his  whole  fortune  into  the  company  and  was  to  be 
its  technical  head,  he  was  entitled  to  full  control.  It  had 
been  with  the  greatest  reluctance  that  he  had  consented 
to  a  divided  control,  an  even  fifty  per  cent,  in  his  hand 
and  fifty  in  the  hands  of  the  associates.  He  had  relied 
upon  a  gentleman's  agreement  that  this  balance  should 
not  be  disturbed  by  the  issuance  of  treasury  stock.  He 
felt  that  the  payment  of  the  inventor  in  this  stock  was 
dangerous  to  his  interests  as  likely  to  disturb  that  balance. 
It  would  be  a  much  easier  matter  for  Williamson,  Corbett 
and  Crawford,  or  their  friends,  to  possess  themselves  of 
that  stock,  than  it  would  be  for  him.  He  urged,  therefore, 
in  the  interest  of  fair  play,  that  the  cash  price,  or  rather, 
the  best  compromise  they  could  make  on  a  cash  basis,  be 
accepted. 

"Question,"  Corbett  murmured,  when  they  had  heard 
him  in  silence  to  the  end.  But  Frank  Crawford,  after  a 


THE  SAMARITANS  297 

glance  down  the  table  at  Henry  Craven's  troubled  face, 
made  a  little  speech  of  reassurance.  The  agreement  was 
still  a  gentlemen's  agreement,  and  there  was  no  disposi 
tion  on  the  part  of  any  one  to  violate  it.  The  control  had 
from  the  first  been  ambiguous  and  it  would  be  no  more  so 
after  the  stock  sale  had  been  made.  There  was  no  reason 
to  believe  that  the  inventor  was  not  entirely  disinterested. 
Crawford  was  voting  for  a  stock  payment  both  because  he 
did  not  wish  the  company's  financial  resources  depleted 
and  because  he  did  wish  the  personnel  strengthened,  as 
he  believed  it  would  be  by  the  enlistment  of  a  man  whose 
talents,  as  an  inventor,  had  been  so  highly  praised  by 
their  president. 

The  vote  was  then  taken  and  the  motion  carried,  Joe, 
Jennie  and  Nathan  voting  against  it.  It  was  supported 
by  Williamson,  Corbett,  Crawford — and,  most  unhappily, 
by  Henry  Craven.  Joe  shook  hands  with  him  after  the 
meeting  and  told  him  not  to  feel  bad  about  it.  He  'd  acted 
in  accordance  with  the  clear  understanding  under  which 
he'd  been  elected.  He  hadn't  the  heart  to  stay  around, 
however,  to  talk  it  out  with  Joe  and  Jennie,  and  left  with 
John  Williamson. 

Jennie,  tired  out  and  thoroughly  dispirited,  hadn  't  much 
wanted  to  stay  and  talk  it  out,  either,  but  she  had  been 
detained  by  an  imperative  signal  from  Joe.  She  stood 
looking  out  the  window  over  the  lake  while  she  waited  for 
the  room  to  clear.  When  the  door  had  shut  for  the  last 
time,  she  turned  with  what  began  as  a  smile  of  en 
couragement  for  her  defeated  boss.  But  it  ended  with  a 
gasp. 

"Joe!"  she  cried.  He  was  gazing  after  John  William 
son's  back,  with  his  most  brilliant  grin. 

"We've  got  'em,  Jennie!  We've  got  'em  by  the  short 
hairs!" 

"Was  this  what  you  were  working  for,  all  along?  But 
Joe,  why?" 

"Good  lord,  yes!  Didn't  you  see  it?  I  hoped  you 
wouldn't,  because  it  made  your  face  safer,  but  I  didn't 


298         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

suppose  I  could  get  by  with  you.  I'm  pretty  good  when  I 
can  do  that." 

"I  don't  see,  yet,"  she  confessed,  "what  you've  got  out 
of  it,  unless  this  inventor  you  were  so  anxious  to  have 
them  look  up  is  somebody  you — own,  more  or  less." 

"Hell!"  said  Joe.  "I  am  the  inventor.  Patented  the 
whole  thing  myself — as  an  infringement — before  I  pat 
ented  the  others.  Corn-stalks  was  a  damn  good  idea,  wasn  't 
it.  They  might  have  found  the  thing  before  they  went  in 
and  gummed  the  whole  game.  But  they  didn't,  Jennie. — 
Do  you  think  I  'd  go  into  business  with  that  bunch  without 
something  up  my  sleeve? 

"That  stock  will  stay  right  where  it  is,  see,  until  they 
try  to  pull  their  stuff.  I  may  not  have  to  show  down  even 
then,  if  I  can  get  Henry.  I  believe  I  could  have  got  him 
to-day  if  I'd  wanted  him.  I  could  only  use  him  once,  of 
course. 

"Been  feeling  sorry  for  the  old  man,  have  you?  "Well, 
next  time  you  wait.  We've  got  'em  by  the  short  hairs, 
Jennie,  and  when  we  get  ready,  they're  going  to  yelp!" 


CHAPTER  SEVEN 

TRUE   LOVE 


JOE'S  misgivings  about  the  use  Beatrice  had  been  making 
of  her  liberty  was  warranted.  She  had  picked  up  George 
Burns  on  a  drug-store  corner  more  than  once,  and  though 
this  did  not  happen  as  often  as  her  father,  with  deliberate 
exaggeration,  had  suggested  to  Jennie,  the  bond  between 
the  pair  was  stronger  than  anything  his  speculations  ran 
to.  "Within  a  month  of  her  coming  to  Chicago,  there  had 
been  an  episode  which  Trix  herself  recognized  as  important. 

Until  this  happened  she  had  romanticized  about  her 
chauffeur  in  the  half-amused,  half-credulous  vein,  natural 
to  one  in  whose  cultural  background  the  movies  were  so 
important  a  factor.  The  solid  circumstantial  facts  of  her 
transplanting  from  her  mother's  household  to  her  father's 
seemed  unreal  enough  to  justify  her  in  a  day-dreaming 
projection  of  them.  George  Burns  was  in  his  middle 
twenties,  strong,  straight-standing,  well-coordinated;  he 
had  carried  over  into  his  job  as  Greer's  chauffeur  a  mili 
tary  neatness  and  smartness  which  he  had  learned  in  the 
army.  His  smoothly  brushed  hair  had  an  ineradicable 
wave  in  it.  He  had  an  engaging  smile  and  a  pleasurably 
virile  voice.  The  niceties  of  speech  \vere  beyond  him,  but 
to  these,  the  girl 's  ear  was  not,  at  this  time,  sensitive. 

She  did  not,  of  course,  seriously  believe  that  George  was 
really  a  millionaire's  son  or  the  heir  of  a  fabulously  rich 
uncle;  nor  that  he'd  taken  this  humble  job  as  a  means  of 
showing  any  one  his  true  worth,  or  of  finding  some  one  who 

299 


300         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

would  love  him  for  himself  alone,  or  of  foiling  the  matri 
monial  machinations  of  some  sordid  mother  or  aunt.  Yet 
he  made  a  substantial  peg  upon  which  to  hang  idle  ro 
mances  of  this  general  character. 

According  to  her  mood,  her  treatment  of  him  veered 
capriciously;  sometimes  she  was  haughty  and  remote,  the 
complete  employer;  sometimes,  experimentally — and  quite 
unsuccessfully — she  tempted  him;  sometimes,  since  she 
really  liked  him,  she  forgot  all  her  poses  and  treated  him 
like  a  friend.  He  was,  literally,  for  weeks,  her  only  coeval 
companion,  and  for  longer  than  that,  the  only  one  of  them 
whose  good- will  she  didn  't  more  or  less  suspect. 

This  opening  phase  of  their  relation,  after  it  had  lasted 
about  a  month,  was  brought  abruptly  to  an  end.  It  was 
an  especially  fine  day  after  three  of  rain,  a  jolly  south 
wind  blowing  gustily  drying  the  roads  and  fields  and  a 
sultry  red  sun  "carrying  water."  They'd  been  cruising 
about  hunting  out  some  of  the  new  forest  preserves,  Bea 
trice,  of  course,  at  the  wheel. 

She'd  been  in  her  friendliest  mood  with  him  at  first,  im 
pudent,  familiar,  easily  amused.  She  sat  low  in  the  half- 
reclining  seat,  her  feet  riding  the  clutch  and  brake  pedals. 
The  wind  tousled  her  uncovered  head  and  whipped  her 
skirt  about  her  knees.  She  had  George  find  a  cigarette  for 
her  in  the  pocket  of  her  discarded  pongee  coat  and  strike 
matches  for  her,  amid  mutual  charges  of  wilful  clumsiness, 
until  it  was  alight.  She  invited  him  to  take  off  his  stiff- 
visored  cap  as  well  as  the  military  blouse,  which  must  be 
horribly  hot,  and  make  himself  comfortable;  and  when  he 
refused  she  speculatively  suggested  as  reasons  that  he  was 
afraid  of  mussing  his  hair  and  that  he  hadn't  any  proper 
shirt  on  beneath  the  blouse;  only  a  dicky. 

Apart  from  his  refusal  to  get  out  of  uniform,  though, 
he  was  not  very  ceremonious  with  her.  He  shouted, ' '  Hey ! 
Where  you  going?"  when  she  steered  the  big  car  out  of 
the  road  into  a  divergent  cart-track. 

"It's  the  way  in,"  she  explained  with  a  nod  toward  a 
sign  post;  "why  not?"  But  they  were  going  faster  than 


TRUE  LOVE  301 

it  was  written  that  any  car  could  go  over  those  humps  and 
hollows  and  a  series  of  heavy  jolts  supplied  an  answer. 
George  reached  over  to  her  side  and  cut  off  the  ignition. 

"That's  why,"  he  said.  "Better  back  out  before  you 
get  any  deeper  in." 

She  sat  up  with  a  cold  stare  at  him  and  started  the 
motor  again.  "Whose  car  is  this,  anyway?"  she  asked. 
"Anybody  given  it  to  you?  I  told  you  I  was  going  into 
those  woods,  and  I  am.  It's  a  nice  little  woods — even  if 
it  would  get  a  laugh  out  in  California.  And  this  road's 
the  regular  way  in." 

* '  It  was  never  meant  for  a  car  like  this, ' '  he  said. 

From  his  tone  and  the  flush  in  his  face  she  knew  he  was 
angry  and,  perversely,  she  added  another  shovelful  to  the 
fire.  ' '  I  know  what 's  the  matter  with  you, ' '  she  said  with 
a  short  laugh.  "You're  afraid  you'll  have  to  wash.  Get 
ting  spoiled  and  lazy.  A  little  work  won't  hurt  you  a 
bit."  He  flared  a  brighter  red  but  said  nothing. 

She  was  driving  slowly,  now,  with  all  her  skill  and 
caution;  both  were  needed.  Presently  she  found  herself 
on  the  bank  of  a  sluggish  little  stream.  The  road,  twist 
ing  down  a  shallow  gully,  led  through  it,  a  slippery  rutted 
incline  of  clay,  but  the  stream-bed  itself,  she  saw,  was 
paved  in  concrete. 

' '  Look  here,  Trix ! "  he  burst  out,  in  the  face,  apparently, 
of  a  fully  formed  resolution  not  to  speak  again.  "If  you 
go  across  there  you  won't  get  out." 

Once  before,  this  afternoon,  he'd  called  her  that,  un 
consciously  as  now,  and  she,  rather  pleased  than  not,  had 
ignored  the  slip.  But  this  time,  annoyed  by  the  misgiving 
that  he  was  right,  she  snatched  the  advantage  it  gave  her. 
"You're  forgetting  yourself,  Burns,"  she  said,  as  in 
solently  as  she  knew  how.  "When  I  want  any  advice  of 
my  servants,  I  ask  for  it." 

It  was  still  her  program  to  make  it  up  with  him — after 
she  should  have  put  him  completely  in  the  wrong  by  emerg 
ing  unscratched  upon  a  hard  road,  somewhere.  But  the 
program  couldn  't  be  carried  out,  for  the  track,  after  a  twist 


302         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

or  two  among  the  trees  on  the  farther  bank,  betrayed  her 
by  disappearing  altogether  in  a  morass.  She  tried  to  cut 
the  car  around  but  at  the  first  attempt  she  backed  into  a 
tree  and  found  she  was  wedged  fast.  Tears  of  vexation 
were  too  near  her  eyes  to  make  it  safe  to  chance  a  look 
into  the  chauffeur's  set  face. 

"I'm  going  to  get  out  and  look  for  some  may-apples," 
she  said.  "If  you  want  to  turn  the  car  around  you  can. 
If  you  don't,  you  can  wait  till  I  come  back." 

She  found  neither  the  may-apples  nor  the  better  hu 
mored  self-command  which  was  really  what  she'd  gone  off 
to  seek.  She  got  thoroughly  mired,  scratched  and  torn  by 
thorns,  and  horribly  bitten  by  mosquitoes.  She  didn't 
know  whether  she  was  glad  or  sorry  to  find  on  her  return 
that  George  had  got  the  car  around.  She  found  him  look 
ing  stonily  at  a  crumpled  mudguard.  "You  can  drive," 
she  told  him  meekly,  as  she  got  into  the  passenger's  seat. 

"When  they  were  back  on  the  hard  road  she  tried,  non- 
committally,  to  make  peace  with  him,  exhibiting  her  rents, 
scratches  and  mosquito  bites;  but  these  unworded  appeals 
for  his  sympathy  were  fruitless.  Exasperated  again  by 
his  silence,  she  said  presently,  "If  you're  afraid  father '11 
fire  you,  or  anything,  for  the  mess  you  got  the  car  into, 
you  needn't  worry.  I'll  tell  him  I  did  it. — Of  course  it 
was  my  fault,  I  suppose." 

"  I  'm  not  worrying  about  getting  fired, ' '  he  said  grimly. 
"I've  already  quit." 

She  was  startled  into  betraying  real  consternation  at 
this,  but  soon  learned  it  was  not  an  accomplished  fact  but 
a  mere  intention.  He'd  been  trying,  he  said,  for  the  past 
two  or  three  days  to  get  a  chance  to  give  Mr.  Greer  notice, 
but  hadn't  succeeded.  He  wanted  to  do  it  in  a  friendly 
way  because  Mr.  Greer  had  always  treated  him  white. 

To  get  even  with  him  for  having  startled  her  she  laughed, 
skeptically.  "For  a  minute,  I  thought  you  meant  it." 

"You  can  tell  him,  to-night,"  he  retorted.  "With  or 
without  two  weeks'  notice,  just  as  he  likes.  It  can't  be 
too  quick  to  suit  me.  And  you  can  tell  him  why,  too. ' ' 


TRUE  LOVE  303 

She  said  she  didn't  know  why.  "He  pays  you  well 
enough,  doesn't  he?" 

"You  know  why,  all  right,"  he  said.  "There's  nobody 
in  this  world  can  treat  me  the  way  you  do  and  get  away 
with  it." 

' '  If  you  don 't  want  to  be  treated  like  a  servant,  I  don 't 
see  why  you  took  this  job,"  she  grumbled. 

"Like  a  servant!"  he  echoed.  "I  had  two  years  of  it 
in  the  army,  from  a  lot  of  tin  stampings  they  called  of 
ficers.  One  minute  they  'd  forget  that  was  what  they  were, 
and  get  familiar  with  you,  and  then  they'd  remember  and 
ride  you  for  it.  And  you  couldn't  quit.  You  had  to  take 
all  they  wanted  to  give  you.  Well,  the  war's  over  and 
I'm  through.  If  a  person  wants  to  treat  their  chauffeur 
like  part  of  the  machinery  of  the  car,  they  won't  hear  any 
kick  coming  from  me.  But  this  being  treated  like  old 
home  folks  for  a  while  and  then  like  a  dog  .  .  .  Dog! 
Why,  you  wouldn't  know  how  to  treat  a  good  dog." 

"You've  said  enough,"  Trix  told  him  furiously. 
"You've  quit  all  right." 

But  at  the  end  of  ten  silent  miles  she  laid  her  hand  upon 
his  knee  and  said  she  was  sorry.  The  more  she  liked 
people  the  more  she  was  under  the  necessity,  now  and 
then,  of  getting  them  raging  mad  at  her.  She  even  did  it 
to  her  father,  sometimes.  It  was  sort  of  like  Fate,  she 
forlornly  supposed.  She  did  like  George.  Old  home  folks 
was  exactly  how  she  felt  about  him.  She  didn't  blame 
him  for  hating  the  job — which  he  was  too  good  for — and 
she  had  acted  like  a  pig  and  she  didn't  suppose  he  could 
forgive  her. 

Her  hand  had  been  caressing  his  knee  all  the  while 
and  at  this  point  his  driving  got  a  bit  wobbly,  so  with  a 
little  laugh,  she  suggested  that  he  pull  out  at  the  side  of 
the  road  to  finish  their  talk. 

She  was  luxuriating  in  penitence,  of  course,  and  the 
knowledge  that  he  was  deeply  moved  by  it  encouraged  her 
to  go  all  the  further,  but  the  feeling  she  overexpressed  was 
nevertheless  real.  Fundamentally  his  attitude  toward  her 


304         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

was  loyal  and  chivalrous,  and  these  were  qualities  she  did 
not  find  elsewhere — not  even  in  her  father.  She  couldn't 
do  without  George  Burns. 

She  was  a  little  on  guard  with  him  the  next  time  they 
went  out  together,  for  she  had  held  his  hand  during  the 
last  part  of  their  talk  and  she  had  cried  when  he'd  told 
her  that  he'd  stick  whatever  happened  and  would  always 
be  her  faithful  friend  and  servant.  The  thing  couldn't 
go  on  upon  this  plane,  of  course. 

She  was  relieved,  and  about  equally  disappointed,  to 
find  in  him  no  disposition  that  it  should.  He  was  always 
the  correct  chauffeur  when  this  was  what  she  wanted  him 
to  be.  He  never  pressed  for  confidences,  let  alone  for 
endearments.  He  listened  and  advised  her  gravely  when 
she  talked  to  him  about  her  new  friends  and  the  problems 
of  conduct  they  presented. 

By  snatches,  he  told  her  a  good  deal  about  himself,  and, 
so  doing,  dissipated  all  that  was  left  of  her  romantic  imag 
inings  about  him.  He  was  no  prince  in  disguise. 

He  had  been  adopted  out  of  an  orphanage  when  he  was 
too  young  to  remember  it,  by  a  well-to-do  childless  couple 
who  lived  in  one  of  the  smaller  down-state  cities.  His 
adoptive  father  was  proprietor  of  a  machine-shop  and 
a  big  garage  and  a  dealer  in  automobiles.  Had  made 
good  money  at  it. 

As  a  little  boy,  George  had  been  made  much  of ; — noth 
ing  too  good  for  him.  But  then  the  woman,  contrary  to 
earlier  expectations,  had  had  a  baby  of  her  own,  and  be 
gan  developing  a  jealousy,  more  rancorous  from  year  to 
year  until  it  was  almost  insane,  of  the  older  boy.  Every 
cent  that  was  spent  upon  him  came  to  seem  to  her  a  bare 
faced  robbery  of  their  own  child.  She  resented  his  school 
ing,  the  friends  he  made,  his  fun. 

The  husband  was  a  well-meaning  man  and  in  the  in 
terest  of  common  decency  and  justice  combated  his  wife's 
notion  as  best  he  could,  but  his  best  was  ineffectual. 
George  quit  school  at  fifteen  and  went  to  work  in  thq 
garage,  as  floor  boy,  machinist's  helper,  and  so  on.  This 


TRUE  LOVE  305 

made  things  more  peaceful  at  home  for  a  while,  but  the 
mother  began  professing  the  fear  that  his  new  rough  com 
panions  and  ways  would  corrupt  the  younger  boy. 
Everything  she  could  do,  to  emphasize  a  social  distinc 
tion  between  the  two,  she  did. 

By  the  time  he  was  eighteen  George  had  had  all  he 
could  stand  of  it  and  left  for  Chicago  to  make  his  own 
way.  He'd  always  been  able  to  earn  a  decent  living  and 
he'd  never  been  without  ambition  to  raise  himself  out  of 
the  artisan  class.  He  had  joined  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  and  was 
working  at  some  of  the  technical  courses  they  offered  at 
night  school  when  the  draft  got  him. 

In  the  army,  just  as  in  his  earlier  years,  at  home,  he 
had  felt  himself  the  victim,  Beatrice  found,  of  invidious 
caste  distinctions.  He  had  made  a  good  soldier,  smart, 
steady,  ambitious.  So  far  as  any  relevant  tests  went, 
mental  or  physical,  he  was  top-notch  material  for  a  flyer. 
But  he  wasn  't  a  ' '  college  boy ' '  and  they  never  gave  him  a 
chance.  He  was  a  machinist  and  he  had  to  be  grateful 
for  what  crumbs  of  flying  experience  his  pilots  were  good- 
natured  enough  to  let  him  have. 

Trix  was  a  good  enough  democrat,  academically  at 
least,  to  take  the  view  that  this  had  been  an  outrage,  and 
the  two  of  them  often  discussed  their  common  hatred  of 
snobbery.  It  didn't  often  lead  her  to  show  any  considera 
tion  for  his  comfort  or  convenience  at  the  expense  of  her 
own,  but  it  gave  her  a  logical  and  meritorious  basis  for 
treating  him  as  a  social  equal  when  she  felt  like  doing  so. 

She  drifted  into  the  habit  of  bestowing  small  fugitive 
caresses  upon  him,  patting  his  knee,  stroking  his  hand. 
Sometimes  when  he  was  driving  she  snuggled  close  to  him 
and  rested  her  head  on  his  shoulder.  Her  appetite  for  this 
grew  by  what  it  fed  upon  until  she  realized  it  was  serious 
and  tried  to  break  it  off.  Often  she'd  be  with  him  for 
hours  without  touching  him  but  usually  before  the  end  of 
their  ride  she'd  find  herself  doing  it  again.  He  never 
made  any  overt  response  though  she  was  often  made 
aware  that  he  turned  to  iron  in  his  effort  not,  to  do  so. 


306         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

He  believed,  evidently,  that  these  were  not  amorous  ap 
proaches  on  her  part  but  mere  innocent  tokens  of  friend 
liness  and  good  will. 

She  pretty  well  persuaded  herself  that  this  was  what 
they  were,  though  she  never  denied  that  they  were  silly 
and  dangerous.  His  self-control  piqued  her,  while  she 
presumed  upon  it.  If  he  would  just  break  loose  some  time 
and  try  to  make  love  to  her  she  'd  find  it  easy,  she  managed 
to  believe,  to  repulse  him  indignantly,  tell  him  he'd  mis 
understood  her  and  "spoiled  everything" — and,  there 
after,  let  him  alone.  But  in  the  luxurious  day-dreams 
she  sometimes  indulged  in,  she  imagined  him  as  her  lover. 

There  was  no  longer  any  glow  of  romance  about  the  at 
traction  he  exerted  upon  her.  She  saw,  cold '  and  clear, 
the  folly  of  falling  in  love  with  him  and  that  this  was 
what  she  was  doing  was  a  fact  which  five  minutes  of  honest 
reflection  could  always  force  home  to  her.  She  evaded  it 
when  she  could. 

Her  taking  up  with  Lansing  Ware  and  the  "bunch"  of 
ambiguous  nomads  his  inclinations  attracted  him  to,  rep 
resented  a  deliberate  effort  on  her  part  to  break  away 
from  George  Burns.  Their  recklessness,  their  boozy  vul 
garity,  their  pretended  contempt  for  the  gold-coast  set 
whose  manners  they  believed  they  imitated,  all  found  a 
responsive  echo  in  the  cynical  desperation  of  her  preva 
lent  mood,  though  there  were  moments  when  she  loathed 
them  all.  Henry  Craven,  given  a  little  more  self-confi 
dence  and  imagination,  might  have  been  an  effectual  res 
cuer.  That  Sunday  afternoon  he  told  Jennie  MacArthur 
about  was  one  of  the  critical  angles  in  the  course  Beatrice 
steered  that  summer. 

Angered  by  what  she  took  to  be  his  disdainful  superior 
ity  to  her  new  friends,  she  abandoned  herself  more 
recklessly  than  before  to  their  ways.  There  wras  nothing 
repressive  about  them,  anyhow.  They  had  no  polite  hor 
ror  of  scenes.  When  they  quarreled  they  threatened  sui 
cide  or  murder  and  their  reconciliations  were  equally  un 
restrained. 


TRUE  LOVE  307 

Yet  even  to  Trix's  youthful  inexperience,  the  reality  of 
all  this  was  suspect.  They  weren't  so  prosperous  as  they 
pretended  to  be,  nor  so  self-assured,  nor  so  primitive — nor 
even  so  bad. 

They  were  not,  either,  an  escape  from  George  Burns. 
They'd  most  likely  have  guessed  some  sort  of  scandalous 
attachment  between  the  girl  and  her  father's  chauffeur 
even  if  no  such  thing  had  existed.  The  discovery,  soon 
made,  that  it  actually  did  exist  was  a  succulent  morsel  ex 
actly  to  their  taste.  They  treated  it  sentimentally,  jocu 
larly,  melodramatically,  but  whatever  color  they  gave  it,  it 
was  always  kept  in  the  foreground  of  Beatrice's  con 
sciousness.  The  two  were  sometimes  kept  apart,  sometimes 
thrown  together  and  speculation  was  unbridled  as  to  the 
use  they  made  of  their  opportunities. 

George's  solid  virtues,  his  self-control  and  loyalty  fore 
most  among  them,  acquired  a  certain  splendor  by  contrast 
with  all  this  fustian.  He  showed  her  openly  the  contempt 
in  which  he  held  these  "rich  bums"  she  had  made  friends 
with  and  he  often  begged  her  to  let  them  alone,  but  he 
never  made  her  feel,  even  during  her  participation  in  their 
least  creditable  goings-on,  that  she  was,  in  his  eyes,  tarred 
with  the  same  stick.  Indeed,  his  confidence  in  her  funda 
mental  innocence  seemed  to  grow  with  the  need  he  felt  of 
defending  it.  And  that  this  somewhat  shop-worn  inno 
cence  of  hers  was  still,  technically  at  least,  intact  on  the 
day  he  so  satisfactorily  licked  Lansing  Ware  was  due,  pri 
marily  perhaps,  just  to  this  impregnable  faith  of  his  and 
her  consciousness  of  it. 

On  the  third  day  after  his  dismissal  Trix,  with  an  elab 
oration  of  clandestine  contrivance,  met  him  and  had  a  long 
talk  with  him.  She'd  chosen  a  rendezvous,  unhappily, 
upon  the  Municipal  Pier,  a  place  packed  that  hot  August 
day  with  banana-munching  trippers  and  resonant  with 
brass  bands  and  the  chant  of  barkers  for  the  quarter- 
hourly  excursions  to  Lincoln  Park. 

She'd  come  off  without  the  car, — though  Jennie  had  by 
this  time  licensed  her  use  of  it, — partly  from  a  fear  of 


308 

being  spied  upon  and  partly  from  an  idea  that  she  might 
never  go  back  at  all  to  her  father's  house.  There  was  no 
hope  of  any  real  happiness  for  her  there  after  what  had 
happened.  She  knew,  now,  that  she  loved  George  and 
if  her  distorted  memories  could  be  trusted  she'd  avowed 
the  fact  to  him  during  their  drive  home  from  Glencoe. 
"Why  shouldn't  they,  then,  run  off  to-day  to  Milwaukee  or 
somewhere  and  get  married?  If  he  asked  her  to,  she 
would.  If  he  didn't,  she  thought  perhaps  she'd  ask  him. 

But  the  mere  sight  of  him  was  disconcerting.  She'd 
never  seen  him  before  in  an  ordinary  straw  hat  and 
regular  civilian  clothes,  and  a  certain  air  which  she'd 
regarded  as  inseparable  from  him  was  gone.  It  would  be 
a  little  too  much  to  say  that  he  looked  cheap  but  he  would 
never,  for  a  fact,  have  served,  like  this,  as  lay  figure  to 
hang  romances  about  a  disguised  prince  upon.  She  sus 
pected,  too,  that  she  had  somewhat  impaired  herself  with 
him,  arriving  afoot,  hot  and  flushed  and  flecked  with 
soot  from  the  vomiting  funnels  of  the  little  excursion 
steamers. 

The  pair  found  a  corner  where  they  could  sit  in  the 
shade.  The  fact  that  they  loved  each  other  got  itself  de 
clared  and  accepted  as  a  basis  almost  at  once.  He  put  his 
arm  around  her — half  of  the  paired  people  out  here  were 
linked  that  way — and  during  a  moment  of  fortuitous, 
privacy  they  kissed. 

But  the  feel  of  the  adventure  was  pedestrian,  not  aerial. 
George  pointed  out  that  he  hadn't  a  job,  and,  he  added 
with  a  manner  which  struck  her  as  a  little  unnatural,  prac 
tically  no  money.  She  had  nearly  four  hundred  dollars 
of  her  own,  she  said, — with  her ;  but  he  told  her  hotly,  that, 
when  they  ran  away  to  get  married,  it  wouldn't  be  upon 
her  money  that  they  did  it.  She  didn  't  contest  the  point ; 
lacked  the  spirit  to  do  it,  somehow. 

Anyway,  he  went  on  to  say,  they'd  have  to  come  down, 
eventually,  to  living  on  what  he  could  earn.  Mr.  Greer 
would  do  nothing  for  them,  even  in  the  way  of  making  an 
opening  for  him.  Forlornly  she  conceded  this,  too.  She 


TRUE  LOVE  309 

knew  how  implacable  her  father's  resentments  were, 
though  she  was  rather  surprised  that  her  lover  should  see 
so  clearly. 

If  they'd  been  sitting,  while  they  had  this  talk,  in  the 
roadster,  skimming  along  a  white  ribbon  of  road,  or  pulled 
up  in  the  shade  of  some  secluded  lane,  she  might  have 
been  able  to  romanticize  the  idea  of  poverty  with  her  lover 
and  insist  upon  embracing  it.  A  tiny  cottage,  a  single 
room,  anything  that  sheltered  the  pair  of  them  together 
would  be  enough. 

But  out  here  on  the  pier  this  couldn't  be  done.  There 
were  too  many  object  lessons  all  about.  Shrill  children 
carrying  all-day  suckers  on  sticks,  harassed  mothers,  a 
sheepish  father  here  and  there,  peremptory  denials  of  any 
more  pennies  for  the  slot-machines; — this  was  pleasure! 
This  was  a  red  letter  day! 

Her  courage  wasn't  equal  to  it,  nor  his,  either,  the  truth 
was.  For  the  present  they'd  have  to  give  it  up.  If  a 
piece  of  luck  came  George's  way  ...  He  had  a  plan  in 
mind  but  wouldn't  tell  her  now  what  it  was. 

They  exchanged  some  promises,  that  day;  she,  never  to 
have  anything  more  to  do  with  Ware  or  his  bunch,  or  any 
one  like  them,  and  to  quit  drinking — as  he  had  done,  ab 
solutely,  two  months  before ;  he,  never  to  take  another  job 
as  chauffeur  but  stick  it  out  for  something  that  looked 
toward  the  future;  and  not  to  lose  himself  where  she 
couldn't  find  him — if  she  needed  him. 

They  parted  mournfully  enough,  but  comforted  some 
what  by  the  meeting,  for  all  that.  He'd  never  distrust  her 
again,  he  said,  whatever  happened.  He  had  thought  when 
her  father  fired  him,  that  night  on  the  way  to  the  train, 
that  she  might  have  thrown  him  over — made  him  the 
goat. 

"I  never  told  him  anything — about  you,"  Trix  asserted. 
"How  do  you  suppose  he  found  out?" 

It  must  have  been  Miss  MacArthur,  then.  George  had 
talked  to  her.  He'd  had  so  much  on  his  chest  that  night 
that  he'd  had  to  blow  off  to  somebody.  He'd  realized  he 


310         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

was  giving  himself  away  more  or  less,  but  had  thought 
Jennie  too  good  a  friend  to  take  advantage.  So  the 
warmest  emotion  Trix  went  home  with  that  afternoon,  was 
a  lively  hatred  of  Jennie. 

This  was  short-lived,  of  course,  for  it  was  on  that  very 
evening  that  Jennie  offered  her  treaty  and  won  a  victory. 
This  might,  it  is  easy  to  believe,  have  been  much  more 
complete  than  it  turned  out  to  be;  for,  after  all,  Jennie 
failed. 

Her  failure  was  due  to  a  defect  rather  characteristic  of 
her  sex — though  it  is  one  they  are  not  often  charged  with. 
She  was  too  logical.  She  had  taken  a  good  line  with  the 
girl  in  promising  to  ask  no  questions  and  claim  no  privi 
leges,  even  those  of  affection,  but  she  clung  to  this  line 
with  a  blind  consistency  when  a  readier  obedience  to  her 
own  instincts  would  have  led  her  to  abandon  it, 

For  a  while  after  she  had  adopted  Jennie  as  her  friend, 
Trix  thought  of  George  Burns — though  still  tenderly  and 
sometimes  passionately — as  a  danger  from  which  she  had 
been  saved.  Jennie  gave  her  a  new,  and  much  needed, 
emotional  outlet,  and  for  those  first  weeks  the  novelty  made 
this  enough.  But  the  time  soon  came  when  she  wanted 
more.  She  wanted  Jennie  to  ask  questions  and  make  de 
mands,  for  the  simple  reassurance  that  Jennie  cared.  She 
wanted  love.  She  offered  it  and  she  felt  that  the  offer 
was  repulsed. 

So  George  regained  his  place  in  her  reveries,  and,  when 
these  would  no  longer  serve  a  need  sometimes  as  urgent  as 
hunger,  she  began  having  little  talks  with  him  over  the 
telephone,  made  more  difficult  and  more  exciting  by  an 
elaboration  of  devices  against  detection — which  she  half 
hoped  Jennie  would  solve. 

She  saw  him,  for  the  first  time  since  their  parting,  the 
day  she  read  in  the  paper  of  his  having  got  a  job  as  pilot 
in  the  air  mail  service.  They  had  an  afternoon  together, 
in  the  car  again,  revisiting  some  old  haunts  of  theirs,  but 
despite  the  romantic  accessories,  it  was  not  a  very  happy 
time.  He  pressed  her  hotly  now  to  marry  him  and  said 


TRUE  LOVE  311 

some  pretty  bitter  things  when  she  refused  to  promise  any 
thing.  Wasn't  the  job  good  enough  to  suit  her?  He  got 
a  base  pay  of  fifty  a  week  and  five  cents  a  mile.  On  the 
Cleveland  run  this  figured  nearly  fifty  a  week  more. 
And  between  round  trips,  one  day  each  way,  he  had  two 
days  off.  If  she  wouldn't  take  him  at  that  .  .  . 

"I  couldn't  stand  it,  just  waiting.  You'd  be  away  half, 
the  nights,  even."  They  both  thought,  when  they  parted 
that  day,  that  it  was  the  end  of  everything. 

Going  to  school,  though  it  represented  at  first  nothing 
more  than  a  random  attempt  to  escape  from  the  tyranny 
of  her  need  of  him,  afforded  her,  presently,  a  more  hopeful 
idea.  Most  of  her  fellow  students,  she  found,  were  not 
here  to  pass  the  time  nor  even  to  improve  themselves,  but 
with  the  sharply  defined  aim  of  learning  to  earn  them 
selves  a  living.  Teachers,  most  of  them  professedly  meant 
to  be,  professional  entertainers,  a  few  more;  some  of  the 
boldest  avowed  a  hope  of  becoming  real  actors,  on  the 
stage.  Trix  confidently  appraised  herself  as  superior  to 
any  of  them,  harder  of  will,  quicker  of  mind,  more  at 
tractive  of  person.  Anything  they  could  hope  to  do,  she 
could.  Secure  in  her  ability  to  pay  her  own  way,  she 
could  have  George,  she  thought,  on  any  terms  she  liked. 

He  wasn't  very  sympathetic  toward  this  idea  when  she 
broached  it  to  him ;  they  were  always  on  the  edge  of  quar 
reling  over  it,  and  she  was  none  too  confident  of  it  herself. 
Indeed,  there  was  nothing  very  confident  or  clear  about 
her  life,  within  or  without,  during  the  weeks  that  inter 
vened  between  her  father's  disastrous  flying  visit  in  Au 
gust  and  his  final  return  late  in  October.  Her  wishes  and 
her  dreams  contradicted  each  other  and  frequently  them 
selves,  and  her  actions  followed  as  best  they  could  through 
the  maze. 

Before  Joe  took  up  his  post  as  sentry,  determined,  as  he 
said,  to  know,  she  had  drifted  into  a  modus  vivendi  with 
her  lover.  She  saw  him  once  during  each  of  his  off-duty 
periods  in  Chicago,  for  as  long  as  she  could  safely  give 
him,  usually  in  the  afternoon.  In  fine  weather,  they  drove 


312         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

out  into  the  country;  for  bad  days  they  found  various 
ignoble  and  humiliating  hiding-places  in  town.  They 
didn't  plan  much  nor  hope  for  much.  They  merely 
drifted,  dangerously  they  both  knew,  compromising  as 
best  they  could  with  the  desire  that  held  them  in  the 
grip  of  its  great  disinterested  hand. 

2 

Beatrice,  as  Jennie  had  prophesied  she  would,  saw 
through  her  father's  intention  like  so  much  glass.  Even 
during  their  first  dinner  together  down-town  he  asked 
enough  innocent-seeming  questions  to  put  her  thoroughly 
on  guard. 

She'd  looked  forward  to  his  coming,  during  the  three 
days  since  she  'd  known  he  was  expected,  with  a  very  mixed 
lot  of  anticipations.  One  of  these,  incredulously  indulged 
now  and  then,  had  been  a  picture  of  him  finding  her  wait 
ing  in  the  library,  as  he  had  found  her  the  first  time, 
picking  her  up  in  his  arms — as  he  had  not  done  that  time 
— and  sitting  doAvn  in  the  big  easy  chair  with  her  in  his 
lap.  She'd  wondered  whether  she'd  feel,  if  he  did  that, 
a  resurgence  of  that  sense  of  being  swallowed  up  in  his 
comprehensive  embrace,  of  having  found  harbor  there, 
from  doubts  and  from  desires. 

Probably  it  would  not  have  worked  out  like  that  even  if 
he  had  come  home  and  there  had  been  no  restaurant  table 
to  make  it  impossible.  Even  their  first  kiss,  enthusiastic 
as  it  had  been,  had  left  her  unmoved.  She  had  appraised 
its  visible  effect  upon  him  simply  as  an  advantage  to  her 
— a  good  card  in  her  hand. 

At  dinner,  she  threw  out,  pathetically,  the  supposition 
that  he'd  be  going  away  again  in  a  day  or  two,  after  hav 
ing  stayed  just  long  enough  to  make  her  homesick. 

"I  don't  think  I'll  go  back  at  all,"  he  answered,  offhand. 
"I'd  meant  to  clean  up  a  few  things  before  I  came  away 
for  good,  but  as  things  turn  out,  I  guess  they  need  me  more 
at  this  end.  If  I  do  find  I  have  to  run  up  there  again,  it 
will  only  be  for  a  few  days. — "What  would  you  say  to 
coming  alon$r?" 


TRUE  LOVE  313 

"Oh,  dad,  that  would  be  great!"  she  cried,  beaming 
upon  him  and  reaching  out  to  pat  his  hand.  "I've  al 
ways  been  perfectly  crazy  to  travel  with  you.  Any 
where  ! ' ' 

He  meant  to  keep  as  close  watch  as  that,  did  he? 

"How  about  your  school,  though?"  he  asked.  "Do  you 
suppose  they'll  let  you  off  for  a  week?" 

There  might  be  a  trap  here,  either  way;  he  might  be 
angling  for  an  admission  that  the  school  had  been  a 
mere  excuse  for  evading  Jennie,  or  he  might  be  waiting  to 
see  whether  she'd  use  it  with  him  as  a  reason  why  she 
couldn't  leave  town  when  he  did. 

"I'd  forgotten  all  about  school,"  she  told  him  with  a 
fine  air  of  candor.  "Oh,  but  of  course  they'd  let  me  off 
to  go  somewhere  with  you.  I  want  you  to  come  out,"  she 
added,  "the  very  first  day  you  can,  and  see  what  it's  like. 
And  see  what  they  think  about  me,  too.  Mother  never 
would  believe  the  marks  I'm  getting.  How  about  to-mor 
row?" — She  feared  that  sounded  a  bit  overdone. — "Oh, 
I  know  you  wouldn't  be  working  to-night  unless  you  were 
going  to  be  busy  to-morrow.  But  as  soon  as  you  can,  any 
way.  ' ' 

He  nodded.  "Three  or  four  days  will  see  us  through 
this  mess.  I  '11  be  tied  down  every  minute  of  the  time,  till 
then.  Day  and  night,  most  likely.  Leave  you  more  alone 
than  ever,  since  Jennie 's  going  back  to  her  own  flat. ' ' 

"And  a  darned  good  time  for  me  to  be  careful,"  Trix 
reflected. 

"But  after  that,  I'm  going  to  take  it  easy  for  a  while, 
and  we'll  play  around  together.  How  does  that  strike 
you?" 

She  said  it  would  be  wonderful  but  she  didn't  believe  it 
would  ever  happen.  He'd  made  promises  like  this  be 
fore. 

As  they  were  leaving  the  restaurant — early,  since  it  was 
necessary  for  him  to  get  back  to  work — he  asked  her  how 
the  new  chauffeur  was  doing.  "All  right,"  she  told  him 
coolly.  "He  doesn't  drive  as  well  as  George  did,  but  he 
keeps  the  cars  nicer."  The  implausibility  of  her  indif- 


314         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

ference  drew  from  him  a  searching  look  of  overt  suspicion. 
She  returned  it  with  a  challenging  stare. 

The  note  between  them  was  not  always  so  hostile  as  that. 
During  the  month  that  elapsed  before  the  final  explosion 
they  were  together  more  than  ever  before  and  often,  for 
hours  and  even  days  on  end,  the  surface  they  presented 
each  other  was  one  of  unbroken  confidence  and  tender 
ness.  Trix  sometimes  believed  in  the  honesty  of  her  own, 
• — managed  to  think  she  loved  him  as  well  as  ever, — but  she 
never  wholly  trusted  him.  She  was  fully  conscious  of  his 
charm.  She  was  aware  that  she  enjoyed  his  society  as  she 
never  enjoyed,  except  in  the  one  special  way,  that  of  her 
lover,  yet  the  effect  of  this  was  only  to  intensify  her  war 
iness  with  him.  And  she  knew,  all  the  while,  that  the  end 
would  have  to  come,  some  time. 

Her  knowledge  that  she  was  being  watched — spied  upon 
> — was  fortified  by  evidence,  though  the  items  of  it  were 
too  minute  to  be  reported;  a  glance  at  the  superscription 
of  a  letter,  the  too  casual  tone  of  a  question,  an  explanation 
a  little  too  circumstantial  of  his  plans  for  the  day,  an.  oc 
casional  something  queer  about  a  telephone  call. 

She  took  a  rather  cruel  pleasure,  though  it  wasn't  en 
tirely  wanton,  in  feeding  his  suspicion  with  false  clues, 
making  small  mysteries  of  nothing.  She  didn't  believe  he 
was  on  the  main  trail.  "Ware,  whom  she  hadn't  seen  since 
his  licking,  and  some  of  his  associates  were  still  in  her 
father 's  thoughts,  and  he  seemed  uneasy,  too,  about  some  of 
the  new  friends  she  had  made  at  school.  These  suspi 
cions  of  his,  she  deliberately  inflamed. 

The  victories  were  not  all  with  her,  however.  He  was  a 
strategist,  too.  Within  a  week  of  his  return,  he  maneuv 
ered  her  out  of  half  her  liberty  by  appropriating  the  road 
ster  to  his  own  use.  The  closed  car  was  at  her  disposal 
but  since  it  was  a  limousine  the  chauffeur  naturally  went 
with  it,  and  this  unescapable  social  convention  made  it 
useless  for  the  most  important  of  her  purposes.  Yet  in 
the  teeth  of  the  bleak  autumnal  weather  she  couldn  't  avow 
a  preference  for  the  open  car. 


TRUE  LOVE  315 

In  another  way,  too,  the  weather  helped  force  the  situa 
tion.  When  Joe  finally  got  round  to  going  north  again, 
about  the  middle  of  November,  there  was  no  possibility  of 
giving  the  journey  the  color  of  a  pleasure  outing  for  Trix. 
He  put  his  command  that  she  go  with  him  in  the  form  of 
an  invitation  but  didn't  try,  beyond  this,  to  disguise  the 
fact  that  he  was  taking  her  with  him  because  he  was 
afraid  to  leave  her  at  home  alone.  He  flushed  under  the 
sting  of  her  laugh  and  the  savage  sarcasm  of  her,  * '  What  a 
wonderful  time  we  '11  have ! ' '  But  he  offered  no  explana 
tion  and  asked  none. 

During  the  whole  ten  days  the  journey  lasted,  storms 
and  the  mud  kept  her  virtually  a  prisoner  in  a  succession 
of  small  hotels.  She  wrote  long  daily  letters  to  George 
Burns  while  her  father  was  away  about  his  business  and 
in  the  evening  when  he  came  back  she  entertained  him. 
with  a  sulky  silence,  varied  sometimes  by  a  spiritless  ac 
quiescence  in  a  suggested  movie  show  or  by  a  pretended  ab 
sorption  in  a  magazine.  Before  they  returned  they  had 
worn  the  situation  down  to  its  last  shred  of  tolerability. 

They  got  into  town  on  the  morning  of  the  Wednesday 
before  Thanksgiving.  The  closed  car  was  waiting  for 
them  but  Joe  declined  to  share  it  with  her,  even  as  far  as 
the  office,  and  bolted  into  a  taxi.  He  had  been  savagely 
restless,  she'd  noted,  over  his  breakfast  and  behind  his 
newspaper.  She  had  the  chauffeur  drive  her  to  Field's 
and  dismissed  him  there,  saying  she  didn't  know  how  long 
her  shopping  would  take  and  that  she  would  come  home  by 
bus  when  she  had  finished. 

The  one  thought  in  her  mind  was  to  get  to  George  as 
quickly  as  she  could.  She  had  figured  this  as  one  of  his 
off  days  and  was  sure,  having  written  she  was  getting 
home  to-day,  that  he  would  be  waiting  at  his  boarding- 
house  to  hear  from  her.  The  fortnight  since  she  'd  seen  him 
seemed  a  year. 

She  was  angrily  incredulous  of  the  voice — that  of  a 
boarding-house  slavey — which  informed  her  that  Mr.  Burns 
was  out,  and  after  this  assurance  had  been  rammed  home  to 


316         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

her  there  was  a  black  moment  or  two  when  she  turned  her 
wrath  upon  her  lover.  Then  it  occurred  to  lier  that  he 
might  be  the  victim  of  a  change  in  his  timetable  and,  call 
ing  up  the  office  of  the  superintendent  of  the  air  mail, 
she  learned  that  this  was  true.  Pilot  Burns  had  taken  out 
the  Cleveland  mail  that  morning.  He'd  be  returning  with 
it  to-morrow,  some  time  around  noon. 

It  was  an  unbearably  fine  day  to  be  deprived  of  him, 
mild  and  clear ;  they  could  have  spent  it  in  the  open. 
And  to-morrow  was  Thanksgiving,  a  holiday,  which  would 
mean  that  her  father  wouldn't  let  her  out  of  his  sight  all 
day. 

A  panicky  foreboding  took  possession  of  her,  that  she 
might  not  again  be  allowed  even  such  qualified  liberty  as 
she  enjoyed  to-day.  She  had  heard  of  sanitoriums  for 
nerve  and  brain  cases  where  a  person  could  be  shut  up. 
Wasn't  her  father,  angry  as  he  would  be  if  ever  he  found 
out  about  George,  just  the  sort  of  person  to  try  a  thing 
like  that — and  get  away  with  it?  She  ought  to  be  pre 
pared  to  bolt  to  George  and  marry  him  at  a  moment's 
notice,  any  time. 

In  the  train  of  this  half-serious  notion  she  spent  the 
rest  of  the  morning  buying  a  traveling  bag  and  equipping 
it  with  a  complete  outfit  for  the  emergency  she  foresaw, 
including  suit,  hat  and  shoes,  all  inconspicuous  and  ser 
viceable. 

She  deposited  this  "iron  ration"  in  the  care  of  the 
head  porter  in  one  of  the  smaller  down-town  hotels,  a  man 
who  had  already  served  as  her  ally  in  one  or  two  small 
matters.  It  was  to  be  kept  till  called  for,  no  matter  when, 
to-morrow  or  next  year.  Now  if  she  quarreled  with  her 
father  in  the  middle  of  the  night  or  during  an  evening 
party  she  couldn't  be  kept  prisoner  by  a  lack  of  clothes. 

Her  afternoon's  entertainment  consisted  in  looking  at 
furnished  rooms  which  had  been  advertised  for  light  house 
keeping.  To  the  landladies  she  saw,  she  gave  her  name  as 
Mrs.  George  Burns  and  described  herself  as  the  wife  of 
one  of  the  mail  aviators.  She  got  a  good  deal  of  emotional 


TRUE  LOVE  317 

stimulus  out  of  this,  for  they  were  without  exception  in 
terested  and  in  one  case  deeply  sympathetic;  Mrs.  Hen 
derson  didn't  see  how  she  could  endure  the  suspense  of 
knowing  her  husband  might  be  killed  any  day.  Any  day, 
absolutely!  And  Fridays!  She  hoped  Mr.  Burns  never 
had  to  fly  on  Friday! 

The  danger  never  had  worried  Beatrice  very  much;  it 
existed,  of  course — for  every  one  but  George.  But  it  was 
comforting  to  be  cried  over  and  made  a  heroine  of,  and 
she  stayed  the  better  part  of  an  hour  in  the  nice  little 
apartment  Mrs.  Henderson  had  to  let.  She  got  a  thrill, 
too,  from  the  domestic  intimacies  the  place  suggested.  It 
consisted  of  a  sitting-room  with  a  double  bed  in  an  al 
cove,  a  bathroom  and  a  closet  equipped  as  a  kitchenette. 
She  almost  hired  the  place  outright,  and  she  left  with  a 
strong  intimation  that  she  would  do  so,  if  it  weren't  taken 
in  the  meantime,  within  a  day  or  two.  Things  couldn't 
go  on  as  they  were  at  home  much  longer,  anyhow. 
Mightn't  she  as  well  make  an  end  of  that  intolerable  situa 
tion  now  as  later? 

But  she  found  on  reaching  home  about  six  o'clock  that 
this  decision  had  already  been  taken  out  of  her  hands. 
The  look  in  Anson's  face  when  he  met  her  in  the  hall  told 
her  that  something  unprecedented  had  happened. 

3 

"Father  home  yet?"  she  asked,  with  an  affected  care 
lessness  which  didn't  sound  just  right.  Her  heart,  for 
some  incomprehensible  reason,  had  come  up  into  her  throat. 

"He  was  brought  home,  Miss  Beatrice,"  Anson  said  re 
proachfully.  "Around  eleven  o'clock  this  morning,  in  an 
ambulance.  He'd  been  in  an  accident." 

She  was  bewildered  by  this  news.  In  the  first  flash  it 
seemed  unfair,  sweeping  her  own  concerns  off  the  boards, 
as  it  did,  so  summarily.  "Not  a  bad  accident,  Anson?" 
she  asked.  Oh,  but  it  couldn't  be! 

"I  couldn't  say,  Miss  Beatrice.  He  won't  have  it  that 
it  is.  The  doctor  was  apprehensive  at  first,  but  ..." 


318         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"He's  in  bed,  I  suppose,"  she  interrupted.  "I'll  go  to 
him. — I  can  see  him,  can 't  I  ? "  Some  involuntary  signifi 
cation  of  dissent  on  Anson's  part  was  what  made  her  ask 
that  last  question. 

He  said,  "Certainly,  Miss  Beatrice,"  but  she  waited  for 
him  to  explain  his  reluctance.  "You  may  not  find  him 
quite  himself,"  he  warned  her,  and  added  that  the  doc 
tor's  orders  were  strict  against  any  excitement. 

"Well,  of  course,  Anson  knew  the  sort  of  terms  she 's  been 
on  with  her  father  lately.  She  gathered  herself  up  for  a 
retort  and  then  found  she  hadn't  the  heart  to  make  it. 
Before  going  to  her  father  she  paused  a  moment  in  her 
own  room  to  rid  herself  of  her  outdoor  things  and,  as  well, 
to  steady  herself.  She  tried  to  think  what  it  would  be 
like  to  see  him  helpless.  She  wondered  whether  she  was 
sorry  or  glad.  Oh,  of  course  she  was  sorry.  The  tears 
were  already  near  her  eyes  when  she  paused  in  his  door 
way  for  her  first  look  at  him. 

The  pillows  were  packed  behind  him  so  that  he  half  re 
clined,  his  head  was  encased  in  bandages,  his  left  forearm 
lay  across  his  chest  in  splints ;  there  was  a  strong  hospital- 
like  smell  in  the  room,  of  iodoform  or  something  of  the 
sort.  All  this  she  was  prepared  for — and  instantly  thrust 
aside  as  unimportant.  What  engrossed  and  frightened  her 
was  the  way  he  was  looking  at  her  as  if  her  appearance 
bewildered  him,  as  if  he  found  it  unaccountable. 

She  said,  in  answer  to  its  seeming  question,  "Don't  you 
know  me,  dad?  It's  Trix!" 

"Of  course  I  know  you,"  he  answered  petulantly,  and 
thickly — as  if  his  tongue  were  swollen.  "  I  'm  not  out  of  my 
head.  What  made  you  think  I  was?  Anson  been  talk 
ing?" 

"It  was  just  the  way  you  looked  at  me,"  she  said  shakily, 
and  then  went  to  him.  "Oh,  dad,  I'm  so  sorry!"  she 
cried. 

"Better  not  touch  me,"  he  warned  her;  "and  don't  sit 
on  the  bed.  I'm  so  sore  it  hurts  to  be  looked  at."  Ex 
cept  for  the  thickness  of  his  speech  this  sounded  natura? 
enough.  She  pulled  up  a  chair  to  sit  in  and  forbore  t< 


TRUE  LOVE  319 

touch  even  the  big  hairy  hand  that  lay  slackly  on  the 
counterpane. 

"I  didn't  know,  of  course,"  she  said.  "I  just  came  in 
this  minute.  I  haven't  heard  yet  what  happened,  or; 
how.  Are  you  well  enough  to  tell  me?" 

Instead  of  answering  her  question  he  asked  one  of  his 
own.  "Where  you  been  all  day,  Trix?"  For  a  moment 
his  look  pinned  her  fast;  then  it  wavered  away  and  left 
her. 

"Nowhere  much,"  she  answered.  "Shopping  for  a 
while,  and  then  just — wandering  around.  There  didn't 
seem  to  be  any  special  point  in  coming  home." 

"Alone?"  he  asked. 

She  found  herself  crying  as  she  answered  yes.  When 
she'd  wiped  her  tears  and  controlled  her  voice,  she  elab 
orated.  "Absolutely  alone,  dad.  All  day.  I  haven't 
spoken  to  a  person  I  knew  since  I  left  you  this  morning. 
There  wasn't  anybody  I  knew  to  talk  to.  Dad,  it's  true  I 
You  do  trust  me  as  much  as  that,  don't  you?" 

He  shook  his  head  but  it  wasn  't,  she  thought,  so  much  in 
dissent  as  in  perplexity ;  as  if  she  'd  thrown  him  back  upon 
some  puzzle  of  his  own.  The  expression  was  lost  in  the 
twinge  of  pain  the  movement  cost  him.  "Poor  dad,  you 
must  lie  still,"  she  admonished  him  gently.  "Tell  me 
what  happened  to  you." 

"Hit  by  a  motor-car,  it  seems.  I  don't  know  anything 
about  it.  Must  have  stepped  right  in  front  of  it,  I  guess. 
I  sort  of  remember  a  lot  of  yelling  and  the  next  thing  I 
knew  I  was  in  a  bed  in  St.  Luke's  Hospital.  I'm  not 
damaged  to  speak  of.  Broken  collar-bone  and  something 
in  my  arm.  Half  a  dozen  stitches  in  my  scalp.  They 
thought  my  skull  was  fractured  at  first,  but  it  isn't  that 
kind  of  a  skull.  Don't  amount  to  anything — any  of  that. 
Tried  to  saddle  a  nurse  on  me !  Damned  nonsense !  Only 
I  've  got  such  a  hell  of  a  headache.  I  'm  kind  of  mixed  up. 
I  can't  seem  to — remember." 

' '  I  'm  going  to  be  your  nurse, ' '  she  said.  Then  she  asked, 
in  a  more  or  less  automatic  attempt  to  explore  his  lack  of 
memory,  "Where  were  you  when  all  this  happened?" 


S20         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

He  stared  hard  at  her  and  that  same  frightened  look 
came  back  into  his  face.  "I  don't  know,"  he  admitted. 
"Must  have  been  wandering  round,  myself,  I  guess.  I'd 
been  to  see  .  .  .I'd  been  to  some  office  or  other.  There 
were  some  papers  .  .  .  You  see,  they  undressed  me  at  the 
hospital.  I  had  Anson  look  through  my  clothes  and  he 
says  they  aren't  there." 

She  volunteered  to  go  through  his  pockets  for  the  papers 
she  understood  him  to  say  were  missing.  This  was  what 
he  meant,  wasn  't  it  ?  And  if  she  didn  't  turn  them  up,  she 
could  telephone  the  hospital  and  find  out  if  they  were 
there.  What  sort  of  papers  were  they? 

"You  let  my  pockets  alone!"  he  commanded  her 
truculently.  "I  didn't  say  I'd  lost  any  papers.  I'll  re 
member  all  right  in  a  few  hours,  anyway.  My  head's 
clearing  up.  Just  a  little  more  letting  alone — that's  all 
I  need.  You'd  better  go  away  now  and  let  me  see  if  I 
can't  get  to  sleep." 

She  rose,  obediently,  moved  the  chair  out  of  the  way, 
minutely  readjusted  sundry  small  articles  on  the  night 
table,  started  toward  the  door  at  last,  and  then,  with  a 
long-suppressed  sob  came  back  to  him,  kneeled  down  be 
side  the  bed  and  laid  her  cheek  gently  upon  his  hand. 

"I  do  love  you,  dad!"  she  cried.  "I  want  you  to  love 
me  again.  I  want  you  to  forgive  me  for  being  such  a 
beast  to  you." 

He  did  not  speak,  but  his  hand  stirred  and  lightly 
stroked  her  face.  She  kissed  the  palm,  sat  back  upon  her 
heels  like  a  little  twentieth-century  Magdalen,  squeezed  the 
tears  out  of  her  eyes  and  smiled  at  him.  "I  hope  you're 
going  to  be  sick  a  good  long  time  so  you  can  find  out  I 
really  mean  it,"  she  added. 

Anson  knocked  just  then,  to  announce  Doctor  Bennett, 
and  she  fled  to  her  own  room  to  wash  her  face.  Her  last 
impression  of  her  father  was  just  what  her  first  had 
been.  It  had  the  look  in  it  of  one  who  is  struggling  with 
some  incredible  distortion  of  memory. 

Doctor  Bennett  was  an  old  friend  of  Joe's,  a  convivial, 


TRUE  LOVE  321 

witty,  worldly-wise  bachelor  whom  Beatrice  had  once  or 
twice  met  and  not  taken  very  seriously  since  his  manner 
toward  her  had  an  obsolete  touch  of  gallantry  about  it. 
But  his  gravity,  when  he  talked  with  her  in  the  library  at 
the  end  of  his  visit  to  her  father,  was  disquieting.  He 
knew,  he  said,  what  a  shock  it  must  have  been  to  her  to 
come  home,  unwarned,  and  find  him  like  this,  but  she 
must  contrive  to  control  her  feelings  and  do  nothing  to 
excite  him.  He'd  had  a  terrific  blow  on  the  head.  The 
car  that  had  hit  him  had  pitched  him,  head  first,  against 
one  of  the  steel  pillars  of  the  elevated  railroad,  with  a 
noise,  the  horrified  chauffeur  had  said,  like  a  pile-driver. 
The  scalp  had  burst  wide  open  from  the  impact. 

Apparently  the  skull  wasn't  fractured — though  it 
wasn't  always  easy  to  be  sure  of  this.  Anyhow,  he'd  sus 
tained  a  terrible  concussion  of  the  brain.  The  only  treat 
ment  for  this  was  to  keep  him  warm  and  quiet.  "He's 
bothering  over  some  confusion  in  his  memory.  It's  a 
wonder  he  hasn't  lost  it  altogether,  temporarily.  But 
don't  try  to  prod  it  by  asking  him  questions  or  helping  him 
to  put  two  and  two  together.  Let  it  alone.  He's  clearing 
up  fast  enough  as  it  is."  She  readily  promised  obedience 
in  this  matter  and  asked  for  further  instructions  in  the  de 
tails  of  feeding,  temperature-taking  and  so  on. 

She  was  sorry  these  duties  were  not  more  exacting,  for 
the  one  thing  about  her  feelings  she  was  sure  of  was  that 
she  didn't  want  to  be  left  sitting  round  doing  nothing. 
She  didn't  want  to  try  to  appraise  the  impulse  that  had 
taken  her  back  to  her  father's  bedside  just  before  the  doc 
tor  came  nor  to  decide  whether  she  had  meant,  by  asking 
him  to  forgive  her,  a  renunciation  of  George  Burns  or 
not.  As  a  method  of  not  thinking  she  dressed  rather  care 
fully  for  dinner,  which  was  still  a  half-hour  off  when  the 
doctor  left. 

It  was  while  she  was  eating  this  solitary  meal  and  wish 
ing  she'd  telephoned  Jennie  MacArthur  to  come  down  and 
share  it  with  her,  that  she  heard  the  door-bell  ring,  and  a 
wonder  whether  it  mightn't  actually  be  Jennie  made  her 


322         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

listen  intently  when  Anson  opened  the  door.  It  was, 
though,  a  rather  coarse-sounding  man's  voice  asking  for 
Mr.  Greer.  Anson  shut  the  door  at  this  point  and  she 
heard  no  more,  but  it  struck  her  as  odd  that  it  took  him 
as  long  as  it  did  to  get  rid  of  the  visitor.  He  explained 
upon  resuming  his  duties  in  the  dining-room  that  the 
man  had  found  something  her  father  had  evidently  lost 
and  had  been  disposed  to  insist  on  seeing  Mr.  Greer  with 
the  idea  of  being  rewarded  for  his  trouble.  Anson  had 
satisfied  him  by  paying  him  five  dollars  out  of  his  own 
pocket. 

"Was  it  those  papers  he's  been  worrying  about?"  Bea 
trice  asked.  Anson  couldn't  say  as  to  that  but  they  were 
what  appeared  to  be  some  papers  in  a  very  dirty  envelope, 
addressed  to  Mr.  Greer.  He  had  put  them  on  Mr.  Greer 's 
writing  desk  in  the  library. 

It  was  in  a  spirit  of  sheer  idleness  that  the  girl,  when 
she  had  repaired  to  this  room  for  an  after-dinner  ciga 
rette,  went  over  to  the  desk  and  looked  at  the  envelope. 
It  was  a  plain  legal-size  envelope  that  had  been  sealed  and 
roughly  torn  open.  It  was  crumpled  and  smeared  with 
mud  and  the  sheaf  of  typewritten  sheets  it  contained 
bulged  out  a  little  and  was  threatened  with  contamination, 
The  impulse  that  moved  her  to  withdraw  it  altogether  was 
perhaps  half  curiosity  as  to  whether  this  was,  after  all, 
the  document  whose  loss  had  so  distressed  her  father,  and 
the  other  half  mere  fastidiousness. 

"With  a  gingerly  pinch  of  her  finger  tips  she  conveyed 
the  envelope  to  the  wastepaper  basket.  The  stiff  sheets  in 
the  other  hand  sprang  open  and  she  glanced  idly  at  their 
typewritten  contents.  She  had  no  sense  of  prying.  She 
had  assumed  all  along  that  the  papers  related  to  some 
matter  of  business  and  business  was  something  in  which 
she  took  the  most  tepid  interest.  But  her  attention  was 
caught  by  the  first  line  her  eye  fell  upon. 

"Party  was  met  at  corner  of  Broadway  and  .  .  . " 
Why,  that  was  the  drug-store  corner  where  she  used  to 
meet  George!  ...  "by  young  lady  driving  1918  model 
Archer  roadster,  license  number  ..." 


TRUE  LOVE  323 

For  a  moment  the  meaning  of  the  words  was  lost  and 
she  stood  staring  blankly  at  the  page,  beset  by  a  sensation 
of  weakness  and  nausea,  undetermined  between  fright  and 
anger.  Then  she  sat  down  in  the  nearest  chair  and  read 
the  document  through  from  the  beginning. 

It  was  the  report  of  a  detective  agency  upon  her  and 
George,  from  the  twentieth  of  October,  the  week  of  her 
father's  return  from  the  Northwest,  to  the  fifteenth  of 
November,  when  she'd  gone  north  with  him  again.  It  was 
a  pretty  thorough  job  of  spying,  she  noted;  not  many  of 
their  meetings  had  been  missed. 

The  thing  was  loathsome; — this  was  what  she  felt  first, 
before  any  thought  of  the  consequences  of  its  revelations 
had  time  to  form  in  her  mind;  loathsome  in  the  chop- 
licking  leering  nastiness  of  its  attitude,  its  implications, — 
even  its  very  English,  though  here  an  attempt  had  been 
made  to  give  it  a  businesslike  impersonal  cast.  She  could 
see  the  slinking  figure  of  the  ' '  operative ' '  loitering  outside 
doorways,  looking  at  its  watch,  licking  its  pencil  and  writ 
ing  misspelled  notes  in  a  greasy  note-book.  She  felt  her 
decency  affronted  as  it  would  have  been  by  the  discovery 
of  a  Peeping  Tom  at  her  bathroom  window. 

In  her  mind  she  knew  it  was  her  father  who  had  put 
this  affront  upon  her — the  phraseology  of  the  report  made 
this  explicit, — yet  it  was  a  good  while  before  her  anger 
crystallized  itself  against  him.  Every  one  she  knew,  in 
cluding  herself,  seemed  bedaubed  with  the  same  smeary 
stuff.  People  were  like  that.  Her  mother  and  her  grand 
parents  had  spied  upon  her.  George  would  probably  spy 
upon  her  as  soon  as  a  sense  of  a  proprietorial  right  over 
her  licensed  his  jealousy. 

She  wanted  to  get  clear  of  them  all,  where  she  could  live 
naked  in  an  empty  world.  But  there  was  no  such  world. 
All  worlds  were  thick  with  people,  loving,  hating,  spying. 
She  entertained  the  idea  of  killing  herself.  Her  father 
had  two  or  three  revolvers  and  she  knew  where  he  kept 
them.  It  would  serve  him  right  if  she  did  that!  Only 
it  would  be  playing  his  game,  as  far  as  George  was  con 
cerned.  And  besides,  it  wouldn't  .be  fair  to  George. 


S24         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

She  wasn't  thinking  of  George  as  a  lover.  That  de 
tective's  report  had  put  her  out  of  conceit  with  love, — 
made  it  seem  dirty  to  her.  It  was  hard  to  realize  that  it 
was  only  this  afternoon  she  had  been  looking  at  Mrs. 
Henderson's  rooms,  pretending  to  be  George's  wife.  But 
he  was  her  friend,  anyhow.  He  and  Jennie  MacArthur 
were  the  two  squarest  people  she  knew.  So  she  couldn't 
kill  herself.  She  couldn't  even  run  away  without  seeing 
him  first. 

At  half-past  eight  or  thereabouts,  she  heard  her  father 
ring  and  on  impulse  she  forestalled  Anson  and  answered 
it  herself.  She  carried  the  detective's  report  along  with 
her,  rolled  up  tight  in  one  hand.  She  had  forgotten 
Doctor  Bennett's  orders  as  well  as  a  resolution  of  her  own 
not  to  see  her  father  again  nor  speak  to  him  until  he  was 
well  nor  until  her  own  mind  was  made  up  as  to  what  she 
was  going  to  do. 

''Good!"  he  said  crisply,  at  sight  of  her  in  the  door 
way.  "It  was  you  I  wanted  to  see."  , 

"You  look  better  since  your  nap,"  she  remarked. 

"I  feel  like  the  devil,"  he  told  her;  "but  my  mind's 
cleared  up  all  right.  That's  why  I  want  to  talk  to  you, 
without  waiting  any  longer.  Sit  down." 

She  obeyed  him  without  a  word.  He  waited  a  moment 
longer  before  he  spoke  again.  Then,  "I've  got  the  goods 
on  you,  Trix.  I  know  what  you've  been  up  to  with  this 
man  Burns." 

"Yes,  and  I  know  what  you've  been  up  to,  too,"  she 
countered.  "I've  been  reading  this."  She  tossed  the 
document  contemptuously  upon  the  bed.  His  good  hand 
groped  for  it  but  couldn't  quite  reach  it.  "It's  the  re 
port  of  your  detectives,"  she  added. 

"Where  in  hell  did  you  get  hold  of  that?"  he  asked. 

"A  man  brought  it  to  the  door  while  I  was  at  din 
ner,  ' '  she  told  him.  ' '  He  wanted  a  reward  for  it  and  An 
son  paid  him.  The  envelope  was  torn  open  and  all  muddy. 
It  fell  out  of  your  pocket,  I  suppose,  when  you  were  hit 
by  that  car.  The  man  had  read  it,  of  course — and  goodness 


TRUE  LOVE  325 

knows  how  many  other  people.  Not  that  that  matters 
much — to  anybody.  I  spent  an  hour  reading  it  myself. 
It's  pretty  good.  Gave  you  what  you  wanted,  anyhow. 
And  it'll  save  a  lot  of  sob-stuff — between  you  and  me,  I 
mean. ' ' 

She  was  elated  by  the  knowledge  that  she  was  hurting 
him,  savagely.  He  writhed  and  then,  at  the  pain  this 
movement  cost  him,  groaned  out,  "Oh,  God!" 

"You'd  better  lie  still,"  she  went  on  quietly.  "I'm 
going  to  tell  you  what  I  meant  about  the  sob-stuff.  We 
had  quite  a  lot  of  it  the  other  time,  when  George  brought 
me  home  drunk.  All  about  how  you  loved  me  and  were 
going  to  trust  me  just  the  same.  Jennie  was  going  to 
stay  here  while  you  were  away  to  take  care  of  me  and 
be  my  friend.  But  the  past  was  going  to  be  forgotten.  It 
was  a  clean  slate,  you  said.  I  suppose  you  thought  she'd 
spy  on  me,  anyway.  Maybe  you  told  her  to.  But  she 
didn't.  Jennie  was  square, — with  me  and  with  you,  too. 
But  when  you  came  home  she  hadn't  anything  bad  to  tell 
you  about  me.  So,  before  you'd  been  home  a  week  you 
hired  detectives — to  get  the  goods  on  me  like  you  said." 

He  contradicted  her  here.  "I  didn't.  I  didn't  put 
detectives  on  you.  I  put  'em  on  that  dog  of  a  chauffeur 
I'd  fired  for  getting  too  familiar  with  you.  And  God 
knows  I  was  right  to  do  it." 

"Oh,  yes,  you  were  right,"  she  admitted.  "You  thought 
you  'd  get  me  that  way,  and  you  did.  But  if  you  'd  trusted 
me  like  you  pretended  to,  or  loved  me  one  little  bit — the 
way  a  girl's  father  is  supposed  to — you  wouldn't  have 
thought  so.  That's  why  I  say  we  can  cut  out  the  sob- 
stuff." 

"You  stop  talking  a  minute  and  listen,"  he  commanded. 
"I  happen  to  want  you  to  get  this  straight.  Burns  gave 
me  as  a  reference  when  he  applied  for  this  job  in  the  air 
mail.  I  was  fool  enough  to  write  them  a  good  strong  let 
ter  about  him.  Said  he  had  left  me  voluntarily  to  im 
prove  his  position  and  I  thought  he  deserved  to.  I  put  in 
everything  I  could  think  of  to  help  him.  So  when  I  came 


326         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

home  after  he'd  got  the  job,  I  wanted  to  see  how  he  was 
getting  on.  Asked  the  superintendent  about  him.  I 
stopped  at  the  field  one  morning  thinking  I'd  see  him 
take  the  mail  out ;  wish  him  luck  and  so  on.  It  happened 
I  was  just  too  late.  He  was  still  in  sight,  headed  south 
along  the  lake  when  I  got  there.  But  I  stopped  and  talked 
with  his  mechanic.  The  man  had  quite  a  lot  to  say  about 
him  and  his  luck.  One  thing  he  said  was  that  Burns  was 
a  hit  with  the  women.  There  was  one  swell  Jane,  he  said, 
used  to  meet  him  quite  often.  Came  out  sometimes  in  a 
big  car. 

"Trix,  I  swear  I  didn't  think  it  was  you.  Wouldn't 
believe  it  was  you.  But  I  knew  you  were  sore  because 
I'd  let  him  go.  You  gave  that  away  the  first  night  we 
had  dinner  after  I  came  back.  Down  at  the  restaurant — 
remember?  I  thought  if  I  could  prove  to  you  that  he 
was  running  with  somebody  else  you'd  quit  thinking  about 
him.  That's  why  I  told  the  agency  to  look  him  up.  I 
never  thought  they'd  get  you  with  him." 

"Why  not?"  she  asked.  Her  reason  had  accepted  his 
explanation  as  about  half  true.  He  might  have  gone  to 
see  George  off  in  a  spirit  not  wholly  unfriendly.  He 
might  have  entertained  a  hope  that  the  swell  Jane  would 
prove  to  be  some  one  other  than  herself.  But  these  con 
cessions  did  him,  in  her  present  mood,  no  service.  His  pre 
varications  only  made  her  angrier.  So  she  put  all  the 
contempt  of  clear  incredulity  into  her  question.  "Why 
shouldn't  it  have  been  me?" 

His  face  darkened.  "Why  not?"  he  echoed.  "Be 
cause  I  couldn't  believe  it  of  you.  I  couldn't  believe  that 
a  daughter  of  mine  could  ever  lower  herself  to  be  the 
private  snap  of  a  discharged  chauffeur.  Why,  good  God, 
Trix,  when  I  read  that  paper  this  morning  in  Nathan's  of 
fice — something  queer  happened  to  me.  I  didn't  know 
where  I  was.  I  don't  know,  now,  where  I  went  after  I 
left  there,  until  that  car  hit  me.  When  I  came  to  I 
thought  perhaps  the  whole  thing  had  been  a  kind  of  night 
mare  that  I'd  had  since  I  got  hurt ; — going  to  Nathan's  of- 


TRUE  LOVE  327 

fice  and  reading  that  damned  paper  and  all.  And  when 
you  put  your  face  down  on  my  hand  a  while  ago  and 
said  you — you  wanted  me  to  love  you  again  ..." 

His  voice  broke  at  that  and  she  felt  the  tears  coming 
up  into  her  eyes.  "Trix!"  he  cried  at  sight  of  them. 
"Tell  me  it  isn't  true — the  stuff  in  that  paper.  Tell  me 
it's  a  lie  from  beginning  to  end.  Say  the  bare  word  and 
I'll  believe  you,  even  now!" 

She  took  him  up.     "It  isn't  true,"  she  said  quietly. 

At  the  blankly  incredulous  stare  this  drew  from  him, 
she  uttered  a  short  laugh.  "What  it  says  is  true,"  she 
went  on.  "George  and  I  went  to  the  places  he  says  we 
did,  and  I  guess  we  stayed  as  long.  But  what  that  de 
tective  thinks,  isn't  true.  Nor  what  you  think,  either. 
George  is  in  love  with  me,  but  he  wants  to  marry  me. — 
And  he'd  rather  wait  till  then.  I  wouldn't  have  cared 
much,  myself,  except  for  the  way  he  felt  about  it.  I 
didn't  know  whether  I  wanted  to  marry  him  or  not,  but 
I'm  going  to,  now." 

There  was  a  long  silence  between  them  after  that.  She 
knew  it  for  a  lull  rather  than  the  end  but  she  waited  com 
fortably,  feeling  very  solid  and  invincible.  She'd  never 
said  outright,  before, — even  to  herself, — that  she  was  go 
ing  to  marry  George,  and  the  declaration  steadied  her. 

' '  If  that 's  true  .  .  . "  her  father  began  at  last,  but 
he  flinched  under  her  smile  and  revised  the  sentence.  "As 
long  as  that's  true,  that  you  haven't — gone  too  far  with 
him,  there's  still  time  to  avoid  a  smash.  Say  the  word 
and  I'll  buy  tickets  to-morrow  for  a  trip  abroad.  Medi 
terranean  cruise.  Algiers — maybe  Cairo;  ride  around  on 
camels  and  things.  We  could  start  right  after  Christmas. 
I  could  get  away  by  then,  I  think." 

Her  momentary  security  collapsed.  It  was  a  dazzling 
bribe  he  offered.  Travel,  adventure,  bright  colors  in  the 
sunshine,  hot  sands,  camels!  But  he  didn't  stop  there; 
hardly  paused. 

"I  wish  we  could  start  to-morrow!  It's  this  next  couple 
of  months  .  .  .  That's  only  half  the  bargain,  Trix. 


328         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

You'll  have  to  cut  this  other  business  out,  absolutely.  No 
tapering  off  with  last  farewells  and  that  sort  of  stuff. 
You've  been  on  thin  ice — God! — and  if  you  have  got  by 
so  far,  it's  just  a  plain  miracle.  Take  my  word  for  that. 
I  know  how  those  things  go." 

"I  suppose  you  do,"  she  said  reflectively,  and  this 
stopped  him  short,  with  a  dull  flush  and  a  shifting  of  the 
eyes.  "I  wonder,"  she  persisted,  "if  you  ever  saved  a 
girl  against  herself,  the  way  George  has  saved  me. ' ' 

"Drop  that  line,  right  there!"  he  commanded.  "That 
isn't  decent." 

"I  wasn't  trying  to  be  decent,"  she  said  listlessly,  "but 
that's  as  you  like.  Only  I  don't  see  why  you  should  be 
so  down  on  me  marrying  him." 

"Then  you  don't  read  the  papers.  Good  lord,  Trix, 
you're  out  of  your  head!  Just  about  every  other  day 
there's  some  fool  daughter  of  a  rich  man  runs  off  with 
her  father's  chauffeur,  and  it  always  ends  either  in  a 
shooting  or  in  the  divorce  court.  This  is  my  fault,  in  a 
way.  I  was  a  damned  fool  to  let  you  run  with  him  the 
way  you  did  when  you  first  came.  But  I  thought  you 
were  a  little  girl,  then;  too  young  to  be  thinking  about 
things  like  that.  I  didn't  wake  up  till  it  was  too 
late.  But  I'm  awake  now,  all  right.  There's  no  argu 
ment  on  George  Burns.  He's  out!" 

"Dad  ..."  she  began,  but  paused  a  moment  to  search 
her  mind.  She'd  never  been  so  deeply  serious  in  her  life, 
nor  felt  so  compelling  a  need  to  dig  out  the  truth.  ' '  Dad, 
I'm  in  love  with  George.  I — want  him.  I'm  not  silly 
about  him  any  more.  I  was  at  first,  like  those  girls  in 
the  papers.  But  I  've  learned  a  lot  in  these  last  six  months 
— and  I  always  did  know  more  than  you  thought  I  did. 
Out  in  Pasadena  there  were  boys  that  I — let  do  some  of 
the  things  they  wanted  to.  Spoony  things,  I  mean.  I 
didn't  like  it,  specially,  except  that  when  they  were  silly 
about  me,  that  way,  they  were  nice  in  other  ways;  did 
whatever  I  wanted  them  to,  and  took  me  to  places.  And 
there  have  been  one  or  two,  like  that,  since  I  came  here. 


TRUE  LOVE  329 

It  was  kind  of  exciting — in  a  way — but  that  was  all.  I  'm 
telling  you  that  so  you'll  see  how  I  know  that  George  is 
different. 

"When  I  found  out  what  the  difference  was,  I  tried  to 
stop.  I  didn't  want  to  fall  in  love  with  him.  I  was 
frightened  about  it.  But  I  couldn't  stop.  So  I  don't  see 
what  else  there  is  for  me  to  do.  If  I  married  somebody 
else,  that  I  wasn't  in  love  with,  I  don't  know  what  I 
might  do.  And  if  I  don't  marry  anybody  .  .  .  Dad,  you 
must  know  how  it  is!  I'm  like  you.  I  must  be,  be 
cause  I  'm  not  like  mother,  a  bit.  It  never  was  any  trouble 
for  her  to  be  good,  I  guess." 

But  this,  she  saw,  was  an  issue  he  would  not,  or  could 
not,  meet.  "If  you're  afraid  of  him,"  he  said  uneasily, 
' '  I  should  think  that  was  reason  enough  not  to  marry  him. ' ' 

"I  said  of  it,  not  of  him,"  she  retorted.  "I  couldn't 
be  afraid  of  him. — Dad,  he's  good!  He's  kind  and  he's — 
square.  He's  never  tried  to  take  any  advantage,  even 
when  I've  let  him  see  that  he  could.  And  he's  for  me. 
He's  believed  in  me — through  everything.  And  he's  seen 
enough,  goodness  knows!  And  if  you'd  be — friendly  to 
us,  and  help  him  a  little  .  .  .  He  isn't  a  chauffeur  now 
and  he  isn't  ever  going  to  be,  again." 

She  saw  she  was  getting  nowhere  with  the  plea.  Her 
father's  face  was  set.  "Good!"  she  flared  out.  "He's 
too  good  for  me,  that's  the  only  trouble.  He's  the  best 
man  I  know.  He's  better  than  either  of  us." 

"The  hell  he  is!"  said  Joe.  "I  didn't  mean  to  spring 
this  on  you  but  I  guess  it 's  time  I  did.  I  'm  going  to  show 
up  this  bird.  Go  to  the  small  middle  drawer  in  my  desk 
and  bring  me  a  plain  sealed  envelope  you'll  find  there. — 
Bring  it  in  just  as  it  is, ' '  he  called  after  her,  when,  without 
a  word  she  had  gone  on  the  errand.  She  hated  herself 
for  being  frightened,  but  there  was  no  disguising  the  fact 
that  she  was.  "Now,  open  it,"  he  commanded  when  again 
she  stood  before  him.  "Look  and  see  what's  inside." 

It  was  a  cancelled  check  for  a  thousand  dollars,  made 
out  to  George  Burns,  and  bearing  her  father's  signature. 


"Turn  it  over  and  look  at  the  endorsement,"  he  added. 
"You  know  his  handwriting,  I  guess." 

She  obeyed  him  mechanically.  "What  was  this  for?" 
she  asked.  She  managed  to  make  her  voice  ring  cold  and 
hard  enough,  but  she  sat  down  quickly  in  the  chair  she 
had  recently  quitted. 

"Doesn't  the  date  tell  you  anything?"  he  asked.  It 
was  back  in  August.  "Why,  that's  the  day  I  fired  him. 
The  day  he  brought  you  home  drunk.  As  you  say,  he'd 
seen  enough." 

She  repeated,  word  for  word,  her  former  question,  this 
time  with  a  peremptory  emphasis.  "What  was  this  check 


It  stung  him  to  an  outburst  of  anger.  "Why,  if  you 
want  it  straight,  it  was  the  price  he  got  for  keeping  his 
mouth  shut  and  for  letting  you  alone." 

"Blackmail?"  she  asked. 

"Call  it  that  if  you  like.  That  was  the  understanding 
between  us.  He 's  welshed  on  half  of  it,  it  seems.  Whether 
he  has  on  the  other  or  not,  I  don't  know.  Anyhow,  there's 
your  paragon.  And  there's  how  much  in  love  with  you 
he  is.  Less  than  a  thousand  dollars'  worth!" 

She  felt  herself  strangled,  drowning,  and  she  beat  her 
way  frantically  back  to  breathable  air.  "I  know  you're 
a  liar,"  she  gasped,  "and  I  believe  you're  lying  about 
this. ' '  Then,  more  to  the  purpose,  as  her  intelligence  came 
to  the  rescue,  "If  that's  what  he  is,  why  did  you  recom 
mend  him  for  the  air  service?  And  why  did  you  go 
down  to  see  him  off  and  wish  him  luck  the  day  his  me 
chanic  told  you  about  me?" 

The  fierceness  of  her  attack  had  won  her  a  moment's 
breathing  space.  She  folded  the  check  and  tucked  it 
into  the  bosom  of  her  dress. 

"WThat  are  you  doing  with  that?"  he  demanded. 

"I'm  going  to  show  it  to  him,  to-morrow;  see  what  his 
side  of  the  story  is.  Maybe  he's  what  you  say  he  is.  I 
don't  know — about  anybody,  any  more.  But  I  want  his 
own  word  for  this." 


TRUE  LOVE  331 

With  that  she  rose  to  leave  him.  He  struggled  to  sit 
erect  but  dropped  back  with  an  uncontrollable  groan  of 
anguish.  A  smile,  which  felt  all  awry,  came  unexpectedly 
into  her  face.  "It's  a  dirty  trick  to  fight  with  you  when 
you're  helpless  like  this,"  she  observed.  "But  I  suppose 
if  you'd  been  up  and  around  you'd  have  choked  me,  long 
ago." 

"Never  mind  about  that,"  he  told  her.  "But  listen  to 
this  so  there  won't  be  any  mistake  about  it.  Back  last 
April,  some  time,  I  asked  you  to  come  and  be  my  daughter. 
I'd  got  along  without  you  all  right  till  then.  I  can  get 
along  without  you  now.  And  if  you  see  that  dog  again, 
even  if  it's  only  to  match  his  word  against  mine,  I'm 
through.  Perhaps  you'd  better  not  tell  him  so  till 
after  he's  married  you.  It  might  make  some  difference 
to  him.  I  mean  it,  Trix.  That 's  a  promise  I  won 't  break, 
anyhow. ' ' 

"Oh,  we're  at  the  end,  all  right,  whatever  I  do  about 
George.  We'd  have  come  to  smash  about  some 
thing,  I  suppose,  if  it  hadn't  been  for  him.  We're  too 
much  alike,  that's  the  trouble  with  us.  Just  a  little  more 
difference  and  we  might  have  made  it.  I — I  wish  we 
had!" 

Suddenly  she  turned  away  from  him,  feeling  she  couldn't 
bear  the  look  in  his  face.  "I  guess  I  may  as  well  go  now," 
she  added  roughly.  "No  use  dragging  out  the  agony  any 
longer,  is  there?" 

She  left  the  room  swiftly  without  waiting  for  a  reply, 
but  a  few  minutes  later,  clad  in  a  big  fur  coat  he  had  given 
her  before  they  went  North  and  with  her  purse  in  the 
pocket  of  it,  she  reappeared  in  his  doorway.  She  could 
perfectly  well  have  taken  time  to  change  and  pack,  but  it 
was  better  drama  like  this  and  she  needed  all  the  support 
she  could  get.  The  little  bag  in  the  down-town  hotel  made 
it  easy. 

' '  You  don 't  mean  you  're  going  now ! ' '  her  father  cried. 
' '  Not  at  this  time  of  night !  Where  could  you  go  ? " 

She  saw  he  didn't  believe  she  meant  it.     "It  isn't  late," 


332         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

she  said.  "Not  much  after  nine.  And  there  are  plenty 
of  hotels.  I've  still  got  that  good  old  original  five  hun 
dred,  you  see. — Most  of  it.  I  do  mean  it,  dad.  I  'rn  really 
going.  It  wouldn't  do  any  good  to  wait  till  morning.  It 
would  only  mean  that  we'd  have  another  big  fight — and 
they  aren't  good  for  you  when  you're  like  this." 

She  went  over  to  the  side  of  the  room  where  he  was, 
moving  warily  as  she  approached  the  bed,  and,  bending 
down,  rang  his  bell.  "Some  farewell  orders  to  Anson," 
was  all  the  explanation  she  vouchsafed. 

When  the  man  answered  the  summons,  she  said,  ' '  I  'm  go 
ing  away,  Anson.  I'd  like  you  to  telephone  Miss  Mac- 
Arthur.  Tell  her  how  things  are  and  say  I  want  her  to 
come  here  and  take  charge  till  father's  around  again. 
And  I  think  you'd  better  telephone  the  doctor,  too.  He 
said  dad  was  to  be  quiet,  and  we  haven't  been,  very,  so 
perhaps  he'll  be  worse. — That's  all,  I  guess.  You  can 
tend  to  everything  else,  yourself." 

Anson  hesitated,  expecting,  perhaps,  some  contradictory 
word  from  his  employer,  but  none  came  and  he  turned  to 
go.  "Wait  a  minute,"  Trix  called,  and  held  out  her  hand 
to  him.  "Good-by, "  she  said  as  he  came  back  and  took  it. 
" You've  been  awfully  nice  to  me,  Anson." 

"Good-by,  Miss  Beatrice.  I'm  sorry  you're  leaving  us. 
Not  for  long,  I  hope." 

' '  Oh,  till  hell  freezes  over,  or  thereabouts, ' '  she  told  him 
with  a  sort  of  laugh.  "  I  'm  sorry,  too. ' ' 

He  bowed  gravely,  without  the  slightest  change  of  man 
ner,  and  went  away,  to  telephone.  "That's  the  kind  of 
person  to  be,"  she  commented  as  she  turned,  wet-eyed,  to 
her  father. 

She  wanted  a  breath  and  a  gulp  or  two  before  she  could 
be  sure  of  any  voice  to  go  on  with.  "I'd  kiss  you  good- 
by,"  she  said,  with  another  laugh — mostly  sob,  this  time, — 
"  if  I  wasn  't  afraid  you  'd  wring  my  neck  if  you  got  hold  of 
me.  Because  I  do  love  you,  dad.  I  guess  I  always  will; 
whatever  happens,  I'm  glad  I  came  last  April — and  I'm 
sorry  I've  got  to  go  away  now." 


TRUE  LOVE  333 

"You  don't  have  to/'  he  asserted.  "This  is  all  your 
own  doing." 

She  was  in  the  doorway  when  he  said  that,  and  she 
turned  at  it.  "Will  you  let  George  come  here  with  me 
when  he  comes  back  from  Cleveland,  to-morrow,  and  see 
what  he's  got  to  say  about  that  check?" 

But  she  saw  from  his  look,  before  she'd  done  speaking, 
that  he  took  this  as  a  symptom  of  weakening ; — the  threat 
ened  departure  as  a  bluff.  So  without  giving  him  time 
to  refuse  she  went  straight  on.  "Oh,  of  course,  that 
wouldn't  do  any  good.  Very  likely  I'd  go  with  him  any 
how.  Good-by. ' ' 

His  voice  broke  in  a  sob  as  he  called  after  her,  "God 
damn  you,  Trix ! ' ' 

4 

She  took  a  taxi  to  the  hotel  where  she'd  checked  her 
hand-bag,  with  the  idea  of  stopping  there  for  the  night, 
but  in  the  lobby  a  wave  of  homesickness  broke  over  her 
and  on  an  obscure  impulse  she  telephoned  to  Mrs.  Hender 
son.  If  the  rooms  she'd  looked  at  this  afternoon  were 
still  vacant  she'd  come  down  and  occupy  them  to-night. 
She  couldn't  promise  to  rent  them  permanently  until 
she'd  shown  them  to  her  husband  but  she'd  pay  for  the 
night's  lodging,  anyhow.  Mrs.  Henderson  was  agreeable 
and  within  another  half-hour  Beatrice  was  installed  in 
what  might  become  her  home. 

Her  assessment  of  this  likelihood  wavered  a  good  deal 
during  the  night.  The  landlady,  at  their  second  meeting, 
was  not  the  gushing  fountain  of  sympathy  Trix  had  found 
her  in  the  afternoon.  The  furs  and  the  evening  frock 
seemed  to  have  a  chilling  effect; — awakened  suspicion, 
perhaps.  But  the  little  apartment,  when  the  girl  was  left 
alone  in  it,  made  a  background  for  exciting  fancies.  It 
was  spacious  enough  for  two,  and  quite  decently  clean. 
Its  dinginess  would  disappear  under  a  little  brightening 
up.  In  imagination  she  furnished  it  with  two  or  three 
good  rugs,  an  easy  chair  apiece  for  her  and  George,  and 
a  reading  lamp  for  the  table.  The  funereal  onyx  mantel 


334         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

she  put  back  into  the  shadows  behind  the  glow  of  an  an 
thracite  fire.  Could  she  do  it  all  to-morrow  morning,  she 
wondered,  and  have  it  ready  to  show  George  when  he 
came?  No,  of  course  she  couldn't.  To-morrow  was 
Thanksgiving  (poor  old  dad!)  and  the  stores  would  be 
closed.  In  her  nightdress  she  pottered  about  fancifully 
for  an  hour,  until  the  cold  finally  drove  her  to  bed. 

She  fell  asleep  at  once,  having  had,  since  she  'd  awakened 
in  the  Minneapolis  train  that  morning,  a  pretty  full  day. 
But  later,  in  the  dead  of  night,  she  found  herself  broad 
awake  and  unable  for  a  few  minutes  to  remember  where 
she  was.  A  high  wind  had  sprung  up  and  was  banging 
the  loose  window  sashes  furiously.  The  bed  was  cold,  and 
worn  down  into  unaccommodating  hollows. 

The  thought  of  sharing  that  bed  with  George  Burns 
presented  itself  to  her  as  fantastic — impossible.  She  must 
have  been  clean  out  of  her  head  to  have  entertained  it ;  to 
have  come  to  wait  for  him  in  a  place  like  this. 

It  was  funny  about  that  thousand  dollar  check — that  he 
should  have  pocketed  it  and  cashed  it,  and  then  have  come 
to  meet  her  on  the  Municipal  Pier  that  day  and  said  noth 
ing  about  it;  neither  then  nor  since.  Of  course  he  had 
taken  it.  There  was  no  getting  away  from  that  signa 
ture.  It  would  seem  like  an  awful  lot  of  money  if  you 
•were  working  for  thirty  dollars  a  week.  Only — well,  it 
showed  how  little  you  could  tell  about  people.  Probably 
she  was  lucky  to  have  found  out  about  him  in  time. 

To-morrow  .  .  .  She  could  never  go  back  to  her 
father.  He  'd  have  her  at  his  mercy  if  she  did  that.  Sub 
jugated — that  was  the  word.  She  couldn't  go  back  to  her 
mother,  either — not  with  the  lemon-grower  hanging  about. 
He  'd  never  give  her  a  look  in.  A  job,  then ;  that  was  what 
it  came  to.  Hollywood,  that  she  'd  flaunted  in  her  father 's 
face  with  such  bravado?  It  broke  over  her  that  her  no 
tion  of  becoming  a  picture  actress  had  been  nothing  but 
childish  folly,  a  dream  she'd  shared  with  ten  million  other 
girls  and  had  little  better  chance  than  they  of  realizing. 
If  she  had  all  the  clothes  her  father  had  bought  her  during 


TRUE  LOVE  335 

the  last  six  months  she  could  get  work  enough  as  an 
extra  to  keep  her  alive — in  lodgings  meaner  than  these 
that  depressed  her  now.  And  she  might  work  into  stunts, 
doubling  for  well-known  stars,  but  even  this  was  a  long 
road. 

What  was  the  use?  She'd  been  a  fool  to  leave  home 
without  one  of  her  father's  revolvers.  Of  course,  there 
was  always  the  lake.  The  lake,  on  a  night  like  this !  The 
storm  terrified  her.  She  thought  of  George  trying  to  fly 
through  it.  Perhaps  he  wouldn't  come  to-morrow. 

What  sleep  she  managed  to  get  during  the  rest  of  the 
night  was  troubled  by  dreams  and  half -wakings,  and  by 
morning  she  was  pretty  well  washed  out.  She  made  a 
wretched  breakfast  at  a  cheap  neighborhood  restaurant 
and  at  nine  o'clock  telephoned  Anson  to  inquire  about  her 
father,  especially  to  learn  how  much  the  worse  he  was  for 
their  quarrel  the  night  before. 

He  was  very  official.  He  was  answering,  she  surmised, 
at  an  instrument  which  was  within  her  father's  hearing, 
and  he  recited  his  instructions  in  a  tone  that  conveyed  no 
human  feeling  whatever.  He  couldn't  say  as  to  Mr. 
Greer's  condition  and  he  was  to  receive  no  messages. 

"Oh,  well,  give  him  my  love  when  you  get  a  chance," 
she  said  forlornly.  "Keep  it  for  yourself  until  you  do. 
I'll  write  him  a  letter,  to-morrow,  maybe."  She  was  com 
pletely  resourceless  when  she  turned  away  from  the  tele 
phone.  She  had  literally  nothing  to  do. 

The  weather,  though,  gave  her  something  to  think  about. 
Last  night's  gale  was  still  blowing  in  from  the  lake.  It 
wasn't  possible — was  it — that  George  would  try  to  fly 
to-day?  About  ten  o'clock  she  telephoned  the  office  of 
the  superintendent  of  the  air  mail  to  put  an  end  to  her 
uneasiness  by  confirming  this  opinion,  and  to  her  horri 
fied  amazement  was  told  in  matter-of-fact  tones  that  the 
mail  had  left  Cleveland  at  eight-thirty  as  usual  and  might 
be  expected  in  about  noon. 

She  set  out  at  once  afoot  for  Grant  Park  despite  a 
prospective  wait  there  of  nearly  two  hours.  Common 


336         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

sense,  she  was  aware,  in  the  person  of  Jennie  MacArthur  or 
Mrs.  Henderson,  would  have  counseled  diversion,  pointing 
out  that  she  couldn't  do  the  flyer  any  good  by  watching 
the  clouds  and  worrying  about  him.  Diversion !  That 
showed  what  common  sense  amounted  to. 

As  it  happened  (and  often  it  does!)  irrational 
instinct  proved  the  better  guide.  The  fierceness  of 
the  gale — more  evident  here  on  the  lake  front 
than  back  among  the  big  buildings  of  the  loop 
— whipped  up  a  corresponding  fierceness  in  her  mood,  an 
emotion  much  more  stimulating  than  the  cold  misery  of 
the  earlier  morning.  She  raged  at  the  order  and  the  com 
placent  authority  of  a  world  where  soft-bellied  men  in 
armchairs  could  send  their  betters  aloft  to  play  tag  with, 
death,  not  upon  glorious  enterprises  but  about  the  pro 
saic  business  of  delivering  letters.  It  would  serve  them 
right  if  George  should  arrive  with  bombs  instead  of  his 
sacks  of  mail  and  sprinkle  them  around  upon  the  roofs  of 
that  lazy  town  where,  by  the  way  of  celebrating  a  holi 
day,  people  overslept  in  anticipation  of  overeating,  later 
on.  She  built  up  an  angry  grievance  against  the  absen 
tees  from  the  park — they  turned  out  numerously  enough, 
goodness  knew,  on  a  fine  day! — and  equally  against  the 
indifferent  few  who  were  here,  variously  occupied  but 
alike  in  their  dull  unconcern  with  the  storm. 

A  special  object  of  her  annoyance  was  the  driver  of  a 
small  mail  truck  who  drove  out  over  the  Randolph  Street 
viaduct  and  backed  up  against  the  wind  not  far  from 
where  she  stood.  She  watched  him  resentfully  for  five 
minutes,  while  he  was  getting  his  pipe  alight  and  making 
himself  comfortable,  before  she  recognized,  in  his  pres 
ence  here,  an  official  expectation  that  George  would  ac 
complish  his  journey  safely. 

She  went  over  to  him  and  asked  if  he  was  waiting  for 
the  air  mail.  "When  he  nodded  she  went  on,  "Do  you 
think  he'll  ever  make  it,  a  day  like  this?" 

"Going  to  make  a  record  trip,  I  guess — with  this  wind 
behind  him.  It's  the  fellow  going  the  other  way  you 
want  to  be  sorry  for." 


TRUE  LOVE  337 

This  struck  Trix  as  outrageously  unfair.  "You'd  be 
sorry  for  yourself,  I  bet,  if  you  had  to  land  in  a  place  like 
this." 

He  didn't  deny  it,  but  he  thought  this  man  would  prob 
ably  get  down  all  right.  "You  can  never  tell,  though," 
he  went  on.  "They  killed  one  of  these  fellows  only  day 
before  yesterday.  Plane  caught  fire  and  burnt  him  to  a 
crisp. ' ' 

She  had  turned  away  with  justifiable  homicide  in  her 
heart  and  was  walking  off,  when  he  called  after  her, 
"There  he  comes,  now!" 

She  saw  the  plane,  far  out  over  the  lake.  It  didn't 
seem  possible — or  endurable — that  he  could  fly  so  slowly. 
She  would  shut  her  eyes  and  count  long  seconds  before 
she  looked  again,  only  to  see  him,  a  little  bigger,  perhaps, 
in  the  same  place. 

A  crew  of  mechanics  had  come  out  of  the  hangar  and 
were  watching  him,  too — callously,  she  thought.  They 
didn't  care  whether  he  got  down  safely  or  not.  It  seemed 
to  her  now  that  he  was  going  straight  by,  as  if  he  didn't 
know  where  he  was.  They  ought  to  signal  him  somehow. 
Oh,  the  fools,  the  fools,  to  stand  there  doing  nothing ! 

No,  he  was  turning  now,  careening  horribly  as  he  came 
round.  She  felt  herself  going  sick  and  shut  her  eyes  but 
opened  them  again  as  the  roar  of  his  motor  ceased.  He 
whipped  across  the  park  like  a  bit  of  driven  scud,  banked 
again  and  was  on  the  ground,  taxying  toward  them,  the 
plane  bouncing  and  bucking  along  like  a  mean  horse. 
She  could  hear  the  rigid  fabric  clanking  like  a  loose  tin 
roof.  The  crew  were  running  toward  him. 

She  wanted  to  run,  too,  but  she  couldn't.  She  hadn't 
strength  enough  to  stir.  He  'd  get  out  of  his  plane  and  go 
away  and  never  know  she'd  come  to  meet  him. 

The  truck-driver  had  been  cranking  his  motor;  now  as 
it  started  he  looked  round  at  her.  "Want  to  ride  over 
there?"  he  asked,  and  added  as  she  assented  with  a 
speechless  nod,  "I  didn't  know  he  was  your  fellow  or  I 
wouldn't  have  been  so  careless  what  I  said." 


338         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

George  didn't  see  her  as  she  came  up  and  she  was  glad 
of  a  minute  to  feast  her  eyes  upon  him.  He  was  deep  in 
talk  with  the  master  mechanic, — "tail  heavy"  was  a 
phrase  her  ear  picked  up, — criticizing  details  of  the  plane's 
performance.  He  had  his  helmet  dangling  in  his  hand 
and  the  wind  was  ruffling  his  short  curly  hair  and  drying 
the  sweat  on  his  forehead.  "Well,"  the  master  said, 
"two  hours  and  twenty-four  minutes  is  nothing  to  kick 
about.  Fastest  yet,  I  guess." 

At  that  George  turned  and  saw  her  standing  beside 
him  and  in  an  instant  she  was  in  his  arms,  her  mouth  upon 
his,  and  the  world  a  dancing  blur.  Hitherto,  in  public, 
they'd  always  been  careful  to  give  their  meetings  a  cas 
ual  air,  but  this  embrace  was  as  much  at  his  initiative  as 
at  hers. 

"I  didn't  think  you'd  come,  to-day,"  he  said  unstead 
ily,  "with  your  father  home,  and  all;  and  me  ahead  of 
time,  too.  But  I  wanted  you  so,  I  was  afraid  to  look 
around  for  you." 

"I've  been  waiting  out  here  for  you,"  she  declared, 
"ever  since  I  heard  you'd  started. 

"I've  had  an  awful  row  with  dad,"  she  told  him,  when 
he'd  drawn  her  aside  to  make  way  for  the  activities  of  the 
crew.  "He  says  I'm  not  his  daughter,  any  more.  He 
told  me  to  tell  you  that  because  it  might  make  a  difference. 
Does  it?" 

' '  I  should  say  it  did ! "  he  cried,  pulling  her  up  in  his 
arms  again.  "Does  it  mean  you're  going  to  marry  me, 
now,  Trix?" 

She  told  him,  blissfully,  that  it  did.  "To-day!  This 
minute,  if  we  could. — I've  already  got  a  place  for  us  to 
live,"  she  added,  and  she  felt  him  give  a  sob  at  that.  "I 
slept  there  alone,  last  night." 

The  mail-truck  driver — in  defiance  of  strictest  regula 
tions — gave  them  a  ride  across  the  long  viaduct,  she  sit 
ting  in  George's  lap,  and  a  cruising  yellow  cab  conveyed 
them  to  the  City  Hall.  It  wasn't  till  they  had  rattled  the 
locked  door  of  the  license  clerk's  office  and  stared  blankly 


TRUE  LOVE  339 

at  each  other  in  the  deserted  corridor,  that  they  realized 
that  the  Thanksgiving  holiday  frustrated  their  plan. 

"I  suppose  to-morrow  will  have  to  do,"  she  said  dis 
mally.  "Oh,  well,  cheer  up!  One  day  isn't  so  much." 

"It  can't  be  to-morrow,  either,"  he  dejectedly  informed 
her.  "I've  got  to  take  the  mail  out  again  at  eight-thirty 
in  the  morning,  and  this  office  won't  be  open  by  then." 

"How  about  your  two  days  off,  between  trips?"  she 
demanded  blankly. 

He  explained  that  he  was  doing  double  duty,  this  week. 
There 'd  been  an  accident  .  .  . 

"The  man  that  was  killed?     Burnt  up?" 

There 'd  been  an  accident,  he  repeated,  ignoring  the  in 
terruption,  and  as  they  were  short-handed  he  had  volun 
teered  to  fill  in.  He  was  paid  extra  mileage,  of  course,  but 
it  wasn't  that.  It  was  so  as  not  to  interrupt  the  service. 

She  blew  up  before  he  could  say  any  more  and,  in  a 
mixture  of  tears  and  temper,  accused  him  of  not  caring 
when  they  were  married,  of  not  wanting  to  marry  her  at 
all,  and  in  a  final  fury  she  delivered  an  ultimatum:  un 
less  he  married  her  to-morrow,  somehow,  she  wouldn't 
marry  him;  she'd  go  back  to  California  on  the  night  train. 
They  'd  let  him  off  to-morrow 's  run  if  he  'd  just  show  spunk 
enough  to  ask  them  to. 

He  was  pretty  glum  about  agreeing  to  this,  but  at  last 
he  did,  and  even  consented  to  her  going  with  him  to  make 
the  request.  They  walked  in  unbroken  silence  to  the 
post-office,  only  to  find  they'd  missed  the  superintendent 
by  minutes.  He'd  gone  home  to  his  Thanksgiving  din 
ner.  Trix  got  his  home  address,  though,  from  the  clerk 
and  they  picked  up  another  taxi  and  started  to  hunt  him 
down.  She  was  on  the  point  of  weeping  again  over  her 
lover's  reluctance  when  suddenly  she  laughed  instead  and 
snuggled  against  him. 

"I've  got  an  idea,"  she  declared.  "We  won't  ask  him 
to  let  you  off.  We'll  ask  him  to  let  me  go  with  you. 
We'll  fly  over  together  and  be  married  in  Cleveland,  to 
morrow.  ' ' 


340         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

She  couldn't  at  first  get  him  to  take  the  idea  seriously. 
They  never  carried  passengers  in  the  mail  planes.  It 
wasn't  allowed.  She  argued  that  this  was  no  reason  why 
it  shouldn't  be  done,  for  once,  in  a  case  like  this.  Let  him 
leave  the  man  to  her.  She  'd  fix  him ! 

"Suppose  anything  was  to  happen,  Trix,"  he  ventured, 
but  she  had  a  swift  answer  to  this  argument. 

"If  you're  going  to  be  killed,  to-morrow,  I'd  rather  be 
killed  with  you  than  have  you  killed  by  yourself. 
.Wouldn't  you?" 

She  had  her  way,  even  as  she  predicted  she  would. 
They  found  the  official  in  his  least  official  mood,  and 
what  with  the  starry  look  in  her  eyes  and  the  thrill  in 
her  voice  and  the  romance  inherent  in  the  situation,  he  was 
able  to  offer  no  more  than  a  perfunctory  resistance.  By 
four  o'clock  the  red  tape  was  unwound,  the  necessary  au 
thorization  signed  and  sealed  and  the  pair,  in  their  fourth 
taxi,  laughed  in  happy  vacuity  at  the  chauffeur's  ques 
tion,  where  to? 

' '  I  sort  of  believe  I  must  be  hungry, ' '  George  remarked. 
"I  haven't  eaten  since  breakfast.  Didn't  want  the  sand 
wich  they  gave  me  at  Bryan." 

"I  haven't  eaten  anything  since  last  night,"  she  said. 
"George!  Thanksgiving  dinner!" 

She  directed  the  chauffeur  to  one  of  her  father's  fav 
orite  restaurants  and  here  they  spent  two  unregarded 
hours,  silent  and  talkative  by  turns,  sometimes  frankly 
holding  hands  across  the  board,  sometimes,  for  fun,  dis 
tantly  ceremonious. 

When  he  got  out  his  pocketbook  to  pay  the  bill,  she 
laughed  in  a  way  that  made  him  ask  her  why. 

"I  thought  of  something  I'd  forgotten,"  she  said. 
"Something  I  promised  dad  I'd  ask  you  about.  It's  that 
thousand  dollar  check  he  gave  you  the  night  you  brought 
me  home,  last  summer." 

He  flushed  bright  red  and  before  answering  unbut 
toned  his  waistcoat  and  from  a  deep  pocket  pulled  out  a 
sealed  envelope  which  he  handed  over  to  her.  It  was  ad- 


TRUE  LOVE  341 

dressed,  she  saw,  to  her  father,  but  a  thrill  she  got  out  of 
the  moist,  body-warm  feel  of  the  packet  distracted  her  at 
tention. 

"There's  his  dirty  money,  waiting  for  him,"  George 
said.  "I've  been  wanting  to  tell  you  about  that.  He 
gave  me  the  check  that  night  when  I  took  him  to  the 
train.  He  said  it  was  a  reward  for  looking  after  you. 
And  then,  at  the  last  minute,  like,  he  said  he  didn't  want 
me  for  chauffeur,  any  more,  and  I  was  to  understand  I 
was  to  let  you  alone  and  keep  my  mouth  shut. 

"I'd  have  given  it  back  to  him,  then,  only,  you  see,  I 
didn't  know  what  you'd  been  telling  him.  Thought  you 
might  have  made  me  the  goat.  I  was  rattled  and  I  couldn  't 
think,  for  the  minute,  how  else  he  could  have  found  out 
about  everything.  And  the  next  day,  when  I  hadn't 
heard  from  you,  I  cashed  the  check — in  those  same  bills. 
I  've  never  touched  a  cent  of  it.  After  that,  I  didn  't  know 
what  to  do  with  it.  I  didn't  know  how  things  were  com 
ing  out  with  you.  And  I  couldn't  send  it  back  to  him  with 
out  as  good  as  telling  him  that  I  was  going  with  you.  So 
I  just  waited." 

"I  knew  it  must  be  something  like  that,"  she  remarked. 
"It  didn't  bother  me  a  bit." 

"Well,"  he  said,  "it  can  go  back  to  him  to-night,  all 
right.  I'm  glad  to  be  rid  of  it." 

Her  ear  caught  something  a  little  unreal  in  the  readi 
ness  of  this  declaration;  not  unwillingness  nor  even  quite 
regret.  After  all,  a  thousand  dollars  was  a  lot  of  money. 
Would  be,  to  them. 

"I  don't  see  why  it  should  go  back,"  she  asserted.  "No, 
George,  listen.  You  kept  your  bargain  with  him  that  day 
on  the  Municipal  Pier,  when  I  wanted  to  run  away  with 
you  and  you  wouldn't.  You  said  you  hadn't  any  money 
and  you  wouldn't  do  it  on  mine.  Now,  when  I've  had 
a  row  with  him  and  he's  turned  me  out — in  the  snow — 
I  don 't  see  what  kick  he  has  on  my  coming  to  you. ' ' 

He  laughed  at  this  argument  and  said  it  sounded  pretty 
thin  to  him.  "However,"  he  added,  "we  can  talk  about 
that,  later." 


342         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

She  tucked  the  envelope  into  her  coat  pocket.  "Talk, 
nothing!"  she  said.  "You've  already  paid  the  money 
back.  To  me.  I'll  write  and  tell  him  so,  anyhow.  And 
I'll  decide  whether  to  send  it  along  to  him,  or  not." 

They  both  fell  silent  after  this  and  presently  she  asked 
him  what  he  was  thinking  about.  "About  to-morrow's 
flight,"  he  reluctantly  confessed.  ""Wondering  how 
rough  the  air  would  be  and  how  high  a  ceiling  we'd  have. 
Sometimes  when  one  of  these  east  gales  has  blown  out  it 
pulls  around  and  gives  you  as  pretty  a  day  as  you  ever 
saw.  But  if  it's  bad,  Trix,  the  thing's  off,  for  you — 
see?"  She  didn't  openly  dissent  and  after  a  minute  he 
added  with  an  uneasy  laugh,  "I  never  was  scared  of  a 
trip  before.  But  when  I  think  what  it  would  mean  if 
anything  went  wrong  .  .  . " 

"You're  tired,"  she  interrupted;  "that's  all  the  matter 
with  you.  No  wonder,  doing  double  work  like  this.  Let's 
forget  it,  for  to-night,  anyway. — I'll  tell  you  what  let's 
do.  Let's  go  and  have  a  look  at  the  place  I've  picked  out 
for  us  to  live.  See  what  you  think  of  it.  It  looked  pretty 
good  to  me  last  night,  when  I  was  thinking  how  we'd  fix 
it  up." 

"I  can't  believe  that  part  of  it,  Trix.  That's  God's 
own  truth,"  he  told  her,  and  his  voice  broke  over  the 
words. 

"I've  brought  Mr.  Burns,"  she  told  Mrs.  Henderson 
half  an  hour  later,  "to  see  whether  he  likes  our  house. 
If  he  does,  we're  going  to  take  it.  You  needn't  bother  to 
come  up,  1  guess.  I  can  show  him  around  all  right." 
But  Mrs.  Henderson,  full  of  sympathetic  good-will  once 
more,  wouldn't  consider  it  a  bother,  and  there  might  be 
some  questions  Mr.  Burns  would  like  to  ask ;  so  she  heavily 
led  the  way  up-stairs  and  showed  them  into  the  apartment, 
with  ceremony. 

George  hadn't  any  questions  to  ask,  it  seemed,  and  his 
replies  to  those  of  Beatrice,  whether  he  liked  this,  or 
thought  that  would  do,  were  almost  monosyllabic,  but  when 
the  tour  of  inspection  was  finished,  she  answered,  confi- 


TRUE  LOVE  343 

dently,  for  his  being  satisfied  with  it.  "We'll  take  it  for 
a  month,  then,  anyway.  And  I  guess  we  might  as  well 
pay  now.  Shall  I,  George,  or  have  you  got  it  handy  ? ' ' 

"I've  got  it,  right  here,"  he  said. 

"Well,  I'll  be  glad  to  have  you  here,"  Mrs.  Henderson 
assured  him,  "though  I  expect  it'll  be  a  strain  on  my 
nerves.  Your  wife  was  telling  me  yesterday  about  your 
job  you  had.  My  heart  ached  for  her,  alone  last  night, 
what  with  the  storm  and  all.  I'm  glad  she'll  have  you 
with  her  to-night." 

Trix  saw  her  lover's  face  go  dull  red  and  noted  that  his 
hands,  busy  with  his  pocketbook,  were  shaking  so  that  he 
could  hardly  extricate  the  bills  he  wanted.  But  he  made 
no  disclaimer  and  he  paid  over  the  first  month's  rent. 
Mrs.  Henderson,  apparently,  had  seen  nothing.  She  said, 
as  she  went  away  with  the  money,  that  she'd  bring  back 
the  receipt  as  soon  as  ever  she  could  make  it  out. 

"Don't  bother,"  Trix  called  after  her.  "Leave  it  on 
the  hall  table  and  we  '11  get  it — some  time  or  other. ' '  Then 
she  closed  the  door,  and,  leaning  back  against  it,  faced 
her  lover. 

There  was  one  aspect  of  her  aerial  elopment  which  Bea 
trice  had  not  counted  upon.  She  had  been  vaguely  aware 
that  their  departure  in  the  mail  plane  on  Friday  morning 
had  stimulated  a  marked  interest  in  the  group  of  spectators. 
She'd  also  been  conscious,  through  the  haze  of  enveloping 
sensations,  when  they  landed  in  Cleveland,  of  the  click  of 
cameras  and  the  rattle  of  questions.  And  there 'd  been  an 
awfully  nice  girl,  a  reporter  on  one  of  the  local  papers, 
who'd  made  her  a  call  at  the  hotel  after  their  marriage  in 
the  afternoon  and  might  have  stayed  longer  if  George's 
return  hadn't  shooed  her  away.  But  none  of  this  had 
prepared  her  for  the  next  morning's  paper.  MILLION 
AIRE'S  DAUGHTER  ELOPES  WITH  MAIL  PILOT 
was  the  seven-column  heading  across  the  front  page.  She 
had  become  a  celebrity!  She  wondered  what  her  father 
would  think  of  that. 


JOE  suffered  no  apparent  relapse  as  a  result  of  his 
quarrel  with  his  daughter.  He  saw  the  papers,  of  course, 
with  the  sensational  accounts  of  her  elopement,  including 
interviews  with  Beatrice  herself,  but  they  were  able  to 
spare  him  the  reporters  who  came  to  get  his  side  of  the 
story.  Jennie,  who  had  come  back  to  the  apartment  in 
response  to  Anson's  message  and  stayed  a  fortnight,  dealt 
with  them  competently,  of  course.  Two  or  three  days  was 
all  that  phase  of  the  affair  lasted.  He  surprised  her  by 
taking  it  so  quietly,  for  the  papers  were  making  him  look 
like  the  theatrical  purse-proud  father  who  hadn't  thought 
an  ex-aviator  who  had  fought  in  France  good  enough  to 
marry  his  daughter.  They  made  it  appear,  also,  that 
George,  already  in  love  with  Beatrice,  had  taken  the  job 
of  chauffeur,  in  order  to  be  near  her.  Whether  this 
was  the  story  the  pair  were  telling,  or  merely  the  conven 
tional  line  of  least  resistance  always  followed  by  re-write 
men  in  newspaper  offices,  it  came  to  the  same  thing. 

Joe's  only  defense  was  to  make  Jennie  read  the  report 
of  the  detective  agency,  and  during  the  sleepless  hours  of 
the  night  after  she  had  finished  it,  she  was  angry  and 
humiliated.  She  felt  the  sting  of  contempt  in  the  girl's 
duplicity.  She  could  remember  dates  mentioned  in  the 
report  as  specific  days;  how  on  this  day  and  that,  after 
stolen  hours  with  her  lover,  Trix  had  come  back  to  her, 
demure,  innocent — laughing  at  her!  She'd  been  fooled  to 

344 


ROMANCE  345 

the  top  of  her  bent,  and  she  acknowledged  as  much  to 
Joe  when  she  came  into  his  room  next  morning  to  see  what 
sort  of  night  he'd  had. 

"Pretty  rotten  with  this  headache,"  he  told  her,  "but 
better  than  you,  at  that,  judging  from  your  looks.  You 
look  like  a  washout." 

"That's  about  how  I  feel,"  she  admitted.  "I  don't 
see  how  you  can  forgive  me,  Joe.  I  was  wrong  about  her, 
all  the  way  through — and  never  surer  in  my  life  that  I 
was  right.  I  wouldn't  have  believed  it,  except  for  what's 
happened." 

"It's  all  right,"  he  told  her.  "No  good  crying  over 
spilt  milk."  He  added,  "Here's  a  letter  from  her;  came 
in  this  morning.  Dispose  of  it,  will  you  ? ' ' 

The  envelope,  addressed  in  the  girl's  sprawling  hand, 
was  still  sealed.  "Dispose  of  it  how?"  Jennie  asked. 

"Burn  it  up,  I  guess.  Read  it  first  if  you  like,  of 
course,  but  don't  tell  me  what's  in  it.  I  don't  want  to 
know. — I've  had  enough,  Jennie." 

She  guessed  that  he'd  like  to  have  her  read  it  and  tell 
him  she  'd  done  so,  but  she  carried  it  to  the  office  with  her, 
undecided  whether  she  would  or  not.  She  felt,  with  the 
report  of  the  detective  agency  fresh  in  her  mind,  that, 
like  Joe,  she'd  had  enough,  and,  finally,  she  tore  the  let 
ter  to  bits,  unopened,  and  dropped  them  into  her  waste- 
paper  basket,  telling  herself  as  she  did  so  that  this  was  the 
end  of  her  concern  with  Beatrice  Greer. 

Of  course  it  was  not.  The  girl  had  been  too  vital  a  factor 
in  her  life  during  the  past  half-year  to  be  dismissed  like 
that.  It  would  have  been  easier,  she  thought  during  the 
first  of  the  ensuing  days,  to  stop  wondering  about  her  if 
she'd  read  that  letter.  It  was  curiosity  that  was  nag 
ging  her,  demanding  satisfaction. 

A  week  or  thereabout  after  she'd  destroyed  the  letter, 
Beatrice  walked  into  her  office  with  no  more  warning  than 
the  tap  of  a  knuckle  upon  her  half-open  door.  Jennie,  who 
had  swung  round  in  her  chair  to  see  who  the  visitor  was, 
felt  herself  go  limp  at  the  sight  of  her.  Her  face  was 


346         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

glowing  with  the  sting  of  the  wind-driven  snow,  tiny 
melted  drops  of  it  hung,  in  her  eyelashes,  and  it  lay  in 
drifts  in  the  folds  of  her  fur  coat.  She  blinked  the  blur 
out  of  her  eyes,  looked  at  Jennie  fixedly  for  a  moment, 
then  stooped  and,  bruskly,  kissed  her.  "I  thought  I'd 
!do  that  before  you  could  stop  me,"  she  said.  She  turned 
away  as  she  threw  back  her  coat,  then  pulled  up  a  chair 
and  sat  down. 

"I  didn't  specially  want  to  stop  you,"  Jennie  said; 
" — only  I  know  now  that  it  doesn't  mean  anything.  And 
never  did." 

"That  means  dad  has  been  making  you  read  the  de 
tective's  report,  I  suppose,"  Beatrice  commented.  "I  did 
think,  perhaps  .  .  .  But  never  mind  that,  now.  "What  I 
came  for  was  to  make  you  tell  me  about  my  father.  I've 
telephoned  two  or  three  times,  but  Anson  won't  say  a 
word.  Last  night  I  went  to  your  flat  to  see  you,  but  you 
weren't  there,  so  I  suppose  you're  still  at  our  house.  It 
was  one  of  George 's  nights  at  Cleveland  and  I  was  feeling 
kind  of  lonesome.  He'll  be  back  to-day,  about  noon — ' 
She  glanced  out  the  window  where  a  momentary  flaw  of, 
snow  had  obliterated  the  shore-line  of  the  lake.  " — Un 
less  he  gets  lost  in  that.  So  I  thought,  while  I  was  wait 
ing,  I'd  come  here  and  find  out;  from  you  or  Henry 
Craven.  I  want  to  know  if  I  made  him  a  lot  worse,  that 
night  I  went  away,  by  quarreling  with  him." 

"No,  I  don't  think  so,"  Jennie  said.  "Doctor  Bennett 
seems  to  think  he's  getting  on  as  well  as  could  be  expected. 
Both  the  bones  are  knitting  up  very  nicely.  Of  course 
he's  terribly  bothered  by  having  only  one  hand.  But  it's 
his  head  that  makes  the  most  of  the  trouble. ' ' 

"His  head!"  The  girl  frowned,  but  there  was  a  gleam 
of  something  besides  concern  in  her  eye.  "Do  you  mean 
there's  anything — the  matter  with  it?" 

"There's  nothing  the  matter  with  his  mind,  if  that's 
what  you're  thinking  of,"  Jennie  answered  rather  grimly. 
"Why?  Did  you  hope  there  was?" 

"Not  exactly.  Only  I  wrote  him  a  letter  a  while  ago, 
that  I  thought  perhaps  he'd  answer;  and  he  never  did." 


ROMANCE  347 

"He  got  it  all  right,"  Jennie  informed  her,  "but  he 
wouldn't  read  it.  Gave  it  to  me  to  tear  up  for  him.  I 
did — without  opening  it." 

Beatrice  laughed  shortly.  "There  was  a  perfectly  good 
check  for  a  thousand  dollars  in  that  letter."  In  response 
to  Jennie's  stare  of  undisguised  astonishment,  she  went  on 
to  explain.  "It  was  the  thousand  dad  gave  George  as  a 
reward.  He  cashed  the  check  for  it,  but  never  touched  the 
money.  When  he  ran  away  with  me,  he  made  me  send  it 
back.  I  put  it  in  my  account  at  the  bank  and  sent  dad 
a  check  for  it,  telling  him,  in  the  letter,  what  it  was.  I 
didn't  much  want  to,  but  George  stood  over  me  until  I 
did.  But  I  guess  if  you  tore  it  up,  that  settles  that.  Only 
you  might  tell  dad  what  was  in  the  letter." 

"I  don't  think  I  will,"  Jennie  said  thoughtfully.  "Not 
for  the  present,  anyhow.  When  his  head  gets  better,  I 
suppose  I  will." 

"What  is  the  matter  with  his  head?"  Beatrice  asked. 

"It  aches,"  Jennie  told  her  simply.  "All  the  time. 
Night  and  day.  Never  stops.  It  isn't  a  sharp  ache,  he 
says;  it's  just  as  if  his  brain  was  a  size  too  big  for  his 
skull.  But  if  he  gets  excited  or  makes  any  exertion,  it's 
worse; — beats,  like  hammers.  That's  why  I'm  not  going 
to  tell  him." 

"Pretty  awful  for  him,  that  would  be,"  the  girl  re 
flected  soberly.  "How  long  will  it  keep  up,  do  you  sup 
pose  ? ' ' 

' '  Months,  perhaps,  Doctor  Bennett  says.  He  hasn  't  told 
Joe  that,  though." 

"Months!"  Trix  echoed,  aghast.  "That'll  drive  him 
crazy. ' ' 

"I  don't  know  what  it'll  drive  him  to,"  said  Jennie. 

"And  I  suppose,"  Beatrice  said  roughly,  "you  think 
it 'sail  my  fault." 

Jennie  didn't  answer  at  once.  "I  wish  I  did,"  she 
said  at  last.  "It's  my  fault,  a  good  deal  of  it.  That's 
what's  worrying  me." 

"Because  you  didn't  play  detective,  yourself,  and  find 
out  about  George  before  dad  came  home  ? — What  difference 


348         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

would  that  have  made?  You  came  nearer  succeeding,  the 
\vay  you  tried.  You  almost  made  it.  If  you'd — cared 
about  me  a  little  more — enough  so  you  had  to  ask  ques 
tions  .  .  .  Oh,  it  would  have  come  to  the  same  thing  in 
the  end,  I  guess,  whatever  anybody  did.  Only,  Jen 
nie  ..." 

Beatrice  got  up,  restlessly,  and  went  to  the  window. 
"It's  clearing  up  a  little,  I  believe,"  she  said;  but  then 
she  came  back,  seated  herself  on  the  corner  of  Jennie's 
desk,  and  tried  again.  "You  told  me  once — it  was  the 
first  real  talk  we  ever  had  together — that  you  weren't  an 
old  maid,  exactly.  I've  thought  of  that,  since,  and  won 
dered  what  you  meant  by  it.  I  don't  suppose  you'd  care 
to  tell  me  that,  now,  feeling  about  me  the  way  you  do." 

She  paused  there,  tentatively,  but  Jennie  volunteered 
nothing,  and  after  a  moment's  silence,  without  looking  at 
her,  Trix  went  on.  "I  thought  perhaps  you  meant  that 
you'd  had  a  lover  once,  yourself.  Really,  I  mean.  And 
that  you  knew  what  it  meant  to — want  him.  And  if  you 
did  mean  that,  maybe  you'd  understand  .  .  .  You  said 
when  I  kissed  you,  just  now,  that  you  knew  it  didn't  mean 
anything  and  never  had.  "Well,  I  thought  if  you  did  a  lit 
tle  remembering,  maybe  you'd  know  better  than  that." 

' '  I  guess  perhaps  I  do, ' '  Jennie  admitted.  She  took  the 
girl's  two  arms  for  a  moment  in  a  tight  grip.  "I'm  glad 
you  said  that, ' '  she  added.  "  I  'm  on  Joe 's  side,  more  than 
ever.  He's  going  to  need  all  the  help  he  can  get.  What 
ever  I  do '11  be  done  for  him.  All  the  same  I  wish  you 
luck,  and  I  hope  you're  going  to  be  happy.  You  are,  I 
suppose,  now." 

"Yes,  I  am."  The  words  were  uninflected,  and  her 
laugh  acknowledged  how  dubious  they  had  sounded.  "I 
mean, ' '  she  explained,  ' '  I  don 't  know  whether  happy 's  the 
exact  word  or  not.  I'm  glad  I  did  it.  I'd  be  glad,  even 
if  it  was  all  going  to  end  in  a  crash,  half  an  hour  from 
now  out  there  on  the  lake  front,  when  George  gets  in  from 
Cleveland.  Because  it 's  been  something,  already,  that  I  'd 
never  have  been  quite — alive  without.  But — life's  kind  of 


ROMANCE  349 

funny,  isn't  it?  Funnier  than  any  one  ever  tells  you. 
You  have  to  go  ahead  and  find  it  out  for  yourself. ' ' 

She  wasn't  asking  for  sympathy,  though,  as  she  made 
clear  by  rising  from  the  corner  of  the  desk  and  moving 
away  a  little.  ' '  I  'in  going  to  school,  again, ' '  she  added,  on 
a  brighter  note.  "George  isn't  crazy  about  having  me 
do  it,  but  I  tell  him  I'd  go  crazy  if  I  didn't.  What  I'd 
really  like  is  to  learn  to  drive  a  plane  and  then  get  a  job, 
myself,  in  the  mail.  I'd  get  the  Omaha  run,  you  see,  and 
then  we  could  come  sailing  in  from  opposite  directions  at 
the  same  time,  and  have  our  two  days  off,  together,  here. 
It  gives  George  fits  to  have  me  talk  like  that,  but  it's  silly 
of  him  because  I  could  learn  to  do  it  just  as  well  as  he 
could.  Anyhow,  there  isn't  a  chance  of  it,  so  he  needn't 
worry. ' ' 

She  scribbled  a  line  or  two  on  Jennie's  scratch  pad. 
"There's  where  we  live,  now,"  she  concluded.  "I  don't 
know  how  long  we'll  stay.  George  is  talking  about  mov 
ing  to  Cleveland,  but  I  don't  want  to,  much.  Anyhow, 
they  '11  forward  it,  if  anything  happens  you  want  to  tell  me 
about. ' ' 

"I  don't  suppose  anything  much  will  happen,"  Jennie 
said,  rising  and  walking  to  the  door  with  her.  "  It 's  prob 
ably  just  the  sort  of  mood  I  've  been  in  that  makes  me  feel 
as  if  something  would.  I'm  glad  to  have  your  address, 
anyway.  And  if  anything  happens  to  you,  let  me  know. 
I'm  glad  you  came  to-day — and  told  me  what  you  did. — 
— Good-by,  Trix." 

She'd  had  to  resist  an  impulse  to  say  a  good  deal  more 
than  that.  All  her  resentment  against  the  girl  had  been 
sponged  out  and  the  underlying  affection  made  legible 
again.  She'd  have  liked  to  say,  "Come  to  me,  nights 
when  George  is  in  Cleveland. ' '  But  Joe  would  never  have 
been  able  to  understand  a  divided  loyalty,  nor  would  she 
dare  risk  an  attempt  to  keep  him  in  the  dark  about  it. 
No,  Trix  would  have  to  lie  in  the  bed  she  had  made.  Jen 
nie  went  to  the  window  to  stare  at  the  lead-colored  sky 
and  watch  the  thinning  flurries  of  snow.  She  didn't  even 


350         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

try  to  get  her  mind  back  upon  her  own  affairs  until  she 
had  seen  the  Cleveland  mail  plane  make  a  safe  landing  in 
Grant  Park. 

Before  Christmas  she  found  a  use  for  the  address  Bea 
trice  had  given  her.  Joe  was  up  and  about  by  that  time, 
and  she  had  moved  back  once  more  to  her  own 
flat.  He  asked  her,  on  one  of  the  first  days 
after  his  return  to  the  office,  to  go  to  his  apart 
ment  at  her  convenience,  sometime  when  he  wasn't  there, 
and  clear  out  the  blue  room,  pack  everything  up  that 
she'd  find  there — and  dispose  of  it.  Anson  and  his  wife 
would  help  her.  The  blue  room  had  belonged  to  Beatrice. 

"Do  you  care  what  I  do  with  the  stuff?"  she  asked. 

"Not  a  damn,"  he  told  her  with  a  steady  stare,  "as  long 
as  you  don't  tell  me  anything  about  it.  I  want  to  find  the 
room  empty." 

So  Jennie  packed  all  the  clothes  and  trinkets  she  found 
in  the  blue  room  and  despatched  them  to  Beatrice.  It 
was,  she  had  no  doubt,  what  Joe  wanted  her  to  do  with 
them. 

2 

Joe  had  expressed  his  wish  to  Jennie  with  characteristic 
accuracy;  he  wanted  to  find  Beatrice's  room  empty. 
Sweeping  away  all  reminders  of  her  was  merely  the 
symbol  of  the  harder  thing  he  was  trying  to  do — empty 
his  memory  of  her.  He  kept  casting  back  in  his  thoughts 
to  the  time,  less  than  a  year  ago,  before  the  news  had  come 
of  his  wife's  contemplated  divorce.  He'd  been  comfortable 
and  contented  enough  then.  Let  him  go  on  from  there, 
as  if  the  services  of  the  respectable  lawyer  in  Pasadena 
had  never  been  retained  and  the  letter  to  Trix,  despatched 
over  Jennie's  protest,  had  never  been  written. 

It  was  funny  that  had  never  occurred  to  him  before — 
but  he  saw,  now,  how  true  it  was — that  the  only  really 
bitter  experiences  of  his  life  were  those  which  involved 
him  with  members  of  his  family;  in  youth  with  his  father, 
in  early  manhood  with  his  wife,  in  middle  age  with  his 
daughter. 


ROMANCE  351 

With  the  rest  of  the  world  he  got  on  satisfactorily 
enough.  Not  always  amicably,  to  be  sure,  but  where  was 
the  harm  in  a  good  fight  with  a  stranger — or  even  with  the 
sort  of  pleasant  acquaintance  you  called  a  friend?  It 
keyed  you  up  to  a  better  best  than  you  could  command  in 
ordinary  circumstances,  and  there  wasn't  a  drop  of  poison 
in  it.  You  gave,  or  took,  your  licking  and  went  on  from 
there.  When  it  was  done,  it  was  done  with.  But  with 
your  own  blood,  or  with  the  wife  of  your  bed,  it  was  dif 
ferent,  whichever  way  the  battle  went. 

He'd  been  no  match  for  his  father,  not  even  after  he'd 
grown  too  big  to  lick,  and  for  many  years  after  the  final 
defeat  of  which  his  flight  had  been  the  admission,  there 
had  rankled  in  him  an  insatiable  grudge.  He'd  never  got 
over  it,  really,  until  his  affair  with  Annabel  gave  him 
something  else  to  think  about. 

And  then,  look  at  Annabel!  She'd  been  no  match  for 
him.  He'd  bullied  her  rather  than  quarreled  with  her — 
there  wasn't  enough  to  her  to  quarrel  with  seriously. 
Anyhow,  it  had  been  as  the  unchallenged  victor  in  their 
differences  that  he'd  gone  off  to  Lima.  He'd  put  her 
clearly  in  the  wrong  by  asking  her  to  go  with  him.  But 
had  this  fact  done  him  any  good?  Not  a  bit  of  it.  The 
thought  of  her  had  rankled,  too;  longer  and  more  bitterly 
than  the  boyhood  memories  of  his  father.  It  was  funny 
about  that,  too.  He'd  had  relations  with  other  women 
that  had  lasted  longer,  and  meant  more  at  the  time,  than 
those  unhappy  months  with  Annabel,  and  none  of  them 
had  ever  bothered  him  much.  Annabel  had  gone  on 
bothering  him  until  Beatrice  had  put  her  out  of  his  head. 

Well,  he  wasn't  going  to  let  Beatrice  nag  him  through 
the  next  twenty  years,  not  though  she  had  declared,  in 
what  were  almost  the  last  words  she'd  spoken  to  him,  that 
she  would  never  stop  loving  him. 

Loving!  A  lot  she'd  loved  him — leaving  him  like  that, 
helpless,  seriously  ill,  for  a  damned  chauffeur !  And 
after  he'd  shown  her  that  cancelled  check,  too,  with 
George  Burns 's  endorsement  on  it, — documentary  proof  of 


352 

the  man's  duplicity.  Her  retort  to  that  had  been  to  call 
her  own  father  a  liar.  She  'd  been  lying  to  him  for  weeks, 
months — from  the  very  beginning,  most  likely. 

She  hadn't  got  away  with  it,  though.  She'd  deceived 
Jennie,  but  she  hadn't  deceived  him.  Very  likely  she'd 
lied  to  him  that  night  in  proclaiming  the  innocence  of  her 
love-affair  with  George.  It  was  quite  possible — the  sweat 
beaded  out  on  Joe's  forehead  when  he  thought  of  this — 
that  she  was  already  pregnant  that  night;  that  she  had 
no  alternative  to  marrying  George,  crook  though  he  'd  been 
proved  to  be. 

She'd  shown  herself  his  own  daughter  in  that,  anyhow. 
She'd  bluffed  it  through  and  left  him  with  the  colors  of 
her  pride  still  flying  at  the  mast-head.  There  had,  in 
deed,  been  no  victor  and  no  vanquished  in  that  engagement. 
This  time  the  fighters  had  been  fairly  matched.  He 
thought  Trix  herself  would  acknowledge  that. 

Often  he  wondered  what  she  had  said  in  the  letter  he'd 
turned  over  to  Jennie  to  destroy.  Jennie  had  read  it 
first,  most  likely ;  he  'd  as  good  as  told  her  to.  He  'd  never 
ask  her  what  had  been  in  the  letter,  but  he  would  rather 
like  to  know  whether  she'd  read  it  or  not.  Just  as  well 
not  to  ask,  though.  Just  as  well  and  a  whole  lot  better. 
There  was  no  telling  where  you'd  stop  if  you  began  ask 
ing  questions.  He'd  been  thinking  about  the  girl  now,  for 
an  hour.  Quit!  That  was  the  only  thing  to  do.  Forget 
her.  Sweep  her  out.  Make  the  place  empty. 

One  thing  would  make  it  easier.  The  girl  could  take 
care  of  herself.  She'd  pretty  well  proved  that.  Always 
light  on  her  feet  somehow,  she  would.  In  that,  again,  she, 
was  her  father's  daughter.  That  had  been  the  principal 
trouble  about  Annabel.  She  had  been  so  damned  help 
less.  And  then,  of  course,  Annabel  had  a  baby.  Trix 
would  have  a  baby,  too,  most  likely.  If  his  latest  guess 
about  her  was  right,  she  had  one  already  on  the  way.  A 
grandson  of  his!  No,  by  God!  Not  as  long  as  that 
damned  chauffeur  was  his  father. 

Suppose  the  fellow  left  her — as  a  man  was  apt  to  do 


ROMANCE  353 

when  he'd  married  after  the  first  climax  of  passion  was 
past — what  then?  Trix  would  never  come  creeping  home 
with  her  baby  in  a  bundle,  after  the  manner  of  the  heroines 
of  old  melodrama,  to  say  she'd  been  foolish  and  had  done 
wrong.  Not  in  a  thousand  years!  Not  Trix.  She'd 
starve  first,  she  and  the  baby  together.  Or  jump  in  the 
lake.  Or  turn  on  the  gas. — Why  in  the  hell  did  he  sit 
there  like  a  maudlin  fool,  thinking  of  things  like  that! 
She  knew  he  would,  damn  her.  That's  why  she'd  said, 
just  before  she  went  away,  that  she'd  never  stop  loving 
him.  Just  to  give  the  screw  a  last  tormenting  turn. 
Now  he'd  waked  up  his  head  again.  Started  the  ham 
mers  going  inside  his  skull. 

That  was  the  whole  trouble  with  him,  really.  And  Ben 
nett,  the  complacent  ass,  insisted  that  there  was  nothing 
to  be  done  about  it  except  wear  it  out.  Three  to  six 
months,  or  it  might  be  even  longer,  that  headache  would 
last,  he  said.  Idiocy,  that  was.  There  must  be  something 
that  would  relieve  the  pressure.  Lift  the  cloud.  But  Ben 
nett  wouldn't  tell  him,  he  supposed,  from  a  fear  that  the 
medicine,  whatever  it  was,  would  be  bad  for  him,  affect 
his  heart,  perhaps,  or  form  a  habit.  What  if  it  did? 
There  was  no  habit  that  couldn't  be  broken,  granted  a 
man  had  a  strong  enough  jaw  to  lock  his  teeth. 

At  his  normal  pitch  of  resolution,  he  would  have  called 
in  another  doctor  forthwith,  and  in  default  of  anything 
satisfactory  out  of  him  would  have  begun  experimenting 
on  his  own  account  among  the  analgic  and  narcotic  drugs 
for  his  remedy;  but  the  trouble  with  him,  precisely,  was 
that  he  couldn't  screw  himself  up  to  normal  pitch.  He 
couldn't  think,  as  he'd  been  wont  to  do,  through  to  a  de 
cision.  He  could  only  go  running  about  in  a  fog,  getting 
nowhere.  The  pain — the  normal  minimum  pain — was 
not  unbearably  severe.  If  it  had  been  anywhere  but  in 
his  head,  he  thought,  he  could  have  ignored  it  and  gone 
about  his  business.  But  this  unremitting  pressure  against 
the  inside  of  his  skull  stupefied  him. 

There  were  two  or  three  fascinating  half-solved  prob- 


354         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

lems  on  his  desk  and  his  drawing-board  at  which  he  could 
do  no  more  than  blankly  stare.  There  were  important 
questions  of  business  policy  to  be  settled,  but  when  he  sat 
in  conference  with  "Williamson  and  Corbett,  he  didn't  more 
than  half  follow  what  they  were  talking  about,  and  if  he 
roused  himself,  with  a  spurt  of  temper,  to  take  hold  and 
wrest  the  lead  away  from  them,  the  effort  only  started  the 
hammers  going  again  in  his  head. 

The  devil  of  it  was,  they  could  see  there  was  something 
wrong  with  him.  They  looked  at  him,  sometimes,  with  an 
appearance  of  concern,  and  Williamson,  one  day,  with  an 
air  that  was  friendlier  than  any  he'd  pretended  to  of  late, 
asked  him  why  he  didn't  run  off  for  a  month's  vacation, 
to  Bermuda  or  somewhere.  He  scoffed  at  the  suggestion 
— vacations,  he  said,  weren't  in  his  line — but  it  worried 
him.  They  were  planning  to  put  something  over  on  him, 
most  likely.  He  didn't  even  want  a  vacation.  He  re 
buffed  Jennie's  sound  advice  that  he  take  a  week  at 
French  Lick,  playing  the  roulette  wheel  or  the  little 
horses. 

There  was  a  girl  in  town,  in  one  of  the  musical  shows, 
with  whom  he'd  had  some  rather  vivid  times  in  seasons 
past,  but  he  felt  no  inclination,  now,  to  look  her  up. 
She'd  telephoned,  one  Sunday  morning,  and  he'd  told 
Anson  to  say  he  was  out.  Henry  Craven  had  asked  him 
once  or  twice  to  share  his  seats  at  the  opera  (Margaret 
had  gone  away  again,  this  time  to  Italy),  but  he'd  de 
clined.  There  was  nowhere  he  wanted  to  go,  no  one  he 
had  the  smallest  wish  to  see.  He  didn't  want  to  know  who 
the  people  were  who  called  him  on  the  telephone,  let  alone 
talk  to  them.  Like  a  wounded  bear,  he  had  crawled  into 
the  darkest  corner  of  his  cave. 

"Weeks  went  by  like  that.  Jennie  and  Henry  Craven, 
who  saw  him  daily  at  the  office,  gave  up  trying  to 
cheer  or  even  to  interest  him.  They  had  been  forced  to 
the  conclusion  that  the  only  thing  to  do  was  to  let  him 
alone  and  wait  for  this  phase  to  pass. 

Eventually  it  did.     Quite  by  inadvertence,  Joe  found 


ROMANCE  355 

his  remedy  in  whisky.  He  would  never  have  thought  of 
it,  for  he  did  not  consider  alcohol  as  a  drug,  nor,  hardly, 
the  well  seasoned  Kentucky  bourbon  he  had  stocked  so 
lavishly  with  the  first  threatened  approach  of  prohibi 
tion,  as  an  intoxicant.  "When  he  said  to  Henry,  in  the 
course  of  their  first  talk,  that,  having  tried  every  sort  of 
drink  in  the  world,  he  had  come  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  most  innocent  of  them  was  corn  whisky,  he  was  not 
trying,  as  Henry  thought,  to  be  witty  or  paradoxical;  he 
was  stating  his  honest  opinion. 

He  drank  it  with  all  his  meals  but  breakfast.  He  us 
ually  had  a  drink  or  two  of  it  at  the  fag  end  of  the  after 
noon,  and  if  he  were  passing  the  evening  domestically, 
reading  or  talking  with  a  chance  visitor,  he  drank  it  at 
intervals  till  bedtime.  He  rarely  drank  it  convivially. 
When  there  was  a  party  on,  he  turned  to  more  sophisti 
cated  and  stimulating  beverages.  The  belief  current 
among  his  companions  in  these  affairs  was  that,  no  mat 
ter  what  he  drank,  Joe  couldn't  get  drunk.  He  knew 
better,  but  it  suited  his  egregious  and  overbearing  humor 
to  keep  this  knowledge  to  himself.  He  enjoyed  being  ex 
ceptional. 

The  dullness  of  those  winter  days  after  he  had  got  his 
arm  out  of  its  sling  and  had  begun  going  through  the 
motions  of  living  his  normal  life  drove  him  insensibly  to 
drinking  rather  more  than  his  liberal  ration  of  whisky, 
and  from  week  to  week  the  increase  went  on,  without,  for 
a  long  while,  producing  any  effect  to  attract  his  attention. 
But  there  came  a  vile  fog-bound  sleety  Sunday  in  the 
month  of  February  when  he  sat  from  his  late  breakfast  far 
into  the  afternoon,  the  litter  of  the  Sunday  papers  he  was 
too  deeply  bored  to  read  around  him,  and  the  carafe  and 
syphon  at  his  elbow.  About  four  o'clock  Anson  heard 
himself  being  called  for  in  an  excited  tone  that  brought 
him  in  haste. 

"Anson,"  Joe  demanded,  "do  you  see  anything  of  that 
damned  headache  of  mine  lying  around  anywhere?  Be 
cause,  by  God,  I  believe  I've  lost  it!"  His  voice  had  a 


356         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

ring  in  it  that  the  man  hadn't  heard  since  before  the  ac 
cident. 

Anson  looked  around,  not  because  he  expected  to  see  a 
headache  lying  there,  but  because  Joe  had  told  him  to. 
"I  hope  it  has  gone,  sir,"  he  said.  "Have  you  been  tak 
ing  anything  .  .  .  ?"  His  glance  had  got  round  by  that 
time  to  the  carafe,  and  he  broke  off  short. 

"What  do  you  mean — 'taking  anything'?"  Joe  de 
manded.  His  look  followed  the  butler's  and  came  to 
rest  on  the  carafe. 

"Nothing,  sir,  except  that  I  filled  that  this  morning — 
and  it's  rather  low,  now,  sir." 

Joe  laughed  out,  "Rather  low!  I  should  say  it  was!" 
He  shook  his  head  tentatively  and  added,  "That's  funny. 
If  I'd  laughed  like  that  this  morning  it  would  have 
started  all  the  hammers  going  at  once.  Don 't  feel  a  thing 
now.  Look  here,  Anson,  would  you  say  I  was  drunk?" 

"Certainly  not,  sir."  The  man  seemed  shocked  at  the 
bare  idea. 

"I  expect  I  am,  though.  Must  be.  The  headache  is, 
anyhow.  Sunk.  Drowned.  Well,  I'm  glad  I've  got  on 
to  the  trick  of  it.  I'd  have  gone  mad  in  another  month. 
This  way,  we'll  be  able  to  manage.  See? — God,  what  a 
relief!"  He  stretched,  flexed  his  arms,  kicked  at  the 
heap  of  papers  that  lay  about  his  feet. 

The  dramatic  section  of  one  of  them  was  disturbed  by 
the  movement  and  his  eye  fell  upon  a  reproduced  draw 
ing  of  a  good-looking  young  actress.  He  stooped  and 
picked  it  up  and  began  reading  the  interview  which  filled 
the  rest  of  the  page.  He  knew  Ashleigh,  the  critic  who 
wrote  it,  pretty  well,  and  he  grinned  appreciatively  over 
the  wit  and  the  subtlety  of  some  of  its  implications.  ' '  Es 
ther  sounds  like  the  same  old  girl,"  he  remarked  to 
Anson,  who  not  having  been  dismissed  was  still  standing 
by.  "She  always  used  to  stop  at  the  Congress.  Call  up 
and  see  if  she's  there  now.  If  she  is,  I'll  talk  to  her.  I 
feel  like  having  a  party." 

To   Jennie,  the   change  looked  at   first   almost   like   a 


ROMANCE  357 

miracle.  He  came  breezing  into  the  office  like  a  man 
back  from  a  long  journey,  with  a  word  of  unceremonious 
greeting  to  fling  at  everybody  who  crossed  his  path.  He 
kept  her  and  Henry  gossiping  half  the  morning  in  his 
private  office.  It  was — or  so  it  seemed  at  first — exactly 
as  if  he  had  been  away  ever  since  that  November  journey 
of  his,  when  he  had  taken  Trix  with  him,  and  was  now 
back  again — really  back,  his  old  self. 

It  wasn't  long — certainly  not  a  week — before  Jennie's 
happiness  over  his  recovery  began  to  be  clouded  by  a  mis 
giving  that  it  wasn  't  so  real  as  it  seemed.  He  only  grinned 
at  her  when  she  demanded  that  she  be  told  how  the 
cure  had  been  wrought — grinned  at  her  with  that  gleam  of 
boyish  mischief  in  his  eye  that  would  have  made  a  school 
mistress  want  to  shake  him. 

Jennie  had  never  allowed  herself  to  be  teased  into  that 
attitude  toward  him,  and  she  didn't  try  to  scold  or  cross- 
examine  him  now;  but  privately  she  wondered. 

No  doubt,  with  his  uncanny  perceptions,  he  guessed  that 
this  was  so,  for  within  a  day  or  two,  serious  but  for  the 
gleam  in  his  eye,  he  assured  her  that  there  was  nothing  to 
it.  There  never  was  anything  the  matter  with  him  but 
that  damned  headache,  and  it  quit  all  at  once,  about  four 
o  'clock  last  Sunday  afternoon.  ' '  How  should  I  know  why  ? 
You  act  as  if  it  was  something  you  hoped  I  would  leave 
you  in  my  will ! ' ' 

She  wasn't  at  all  convinced,  and  it  struck  her  that  she 
would  like  some  time  to  ask  Doctor  Bennett  if  a  thing  could 
happen  like  that.  Of  course  she  never  would ;  clear  med 
dling  that  would  be.  She  even  concealed  her  doubts  from 
Henry,  though  they  grew  graver,  and  drew  nearer  to  be 
ing  certainties  all  the  while. 

One  thing  she  had  been  quick  to  note:  Joe  let  his 
drawing-board  severely  alone.  The  design  for  the  flax 
harvester  he  had  been  playing  with  was  no  farther  along 
than  it  had  been  last  summer ;  and  nothing  new  had  ir 
rupted  to  take  its  place. 

He   remained   curiously  indifferent,   too,   to   the   more 


358         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

broadly  political  aspects  of  the  business.  The  Greer  Com 
pany  was  under  contract  to  buy  the  entire  output  of  the 
newly  organized  subsidiary  companies,  and  if  this  ran 
into  anything  like  the  tonnage  they  expected,  the  prob 
lem  of  marketing  it  would  be,  it  seemed  to  Jennie,  serious. 
They  would  have  what  amounted  to  a  new  product,  that 
must  be  made  either  to  adapt  itself  to  existing  channels 
of  trade  or  to  cut  new  ones.  A  revolutionary  matter  any 
way  you  looked  at  it.  The  figures  it  involved  ran  up 
into  millions  of  dollars. 

Joe  would  not  put  his  back  into  this  dawning  phase  of 
the  business.  He  agreed  with  a  good  deal  of  what  Jen 
nie  was  saying,  but  he  yawned  as  he  listened  and  he  al 
ways  finished  the  discussion  by  saying  that  it  was  a  prob 
lem  of  supply,  not  of  demand.  The  important  thing  was 
to  get  those  little  mills  ready  in  time  for  the  next  crop. 

3 

' '  Speaking  of  vacations, ' '  Joe  broke  out,  though  this  was 
not  precisely  what  they  had  been  speaking  of,  "Henry, 
here,  is  the  man  who  needs  one.  He  looks  like  the  devil  to 
me.  Doesn't  he  to  you?" 

John  Williamson,  to  whom  the  question  was  directed, 
looked  thoughtfully  for  a  moment  at  his  cousin  by  mar 
riage,  and  said  he  believed  Joe  was  right.  The  three  men 
were  lunching  together.  The  month  was  still  February; 
Joe 's  alcohol  cure  was  in  its  earliest  phase ;  and  what  they 
had  been  talking  about  was  his  astonishing  return  to 
health. 

Henry  denied  conscientiously  that  he  was  ill,  beyond  the 
chronic  cold  which  every  one  was  likely  to  pick  up  in  the 
fag  end  of  the  winter — and  certainly  no  one  could  pre 
tend  that  he  was  overworked.  But  the  thought  of  a  va 
cation  was  one  he  couldn't  repudiate  very  heartily. 

Any  change  of  scene  would  be  welcomed  as  giving  him 
a  chance  to  stop  worrying  for  a  while.  Very  likely  he 
would  not  succeed  in  breaking  the  habit  altogether.  He 
recognized  that  thinking  in  circles  was  a  constitutional  vice, 


ROMANCE  359 

but  since  last  summer — to  be  precise,  since  that  evening 
when  he  had  dined  with  John  and  Violet  at  Lake  Forest, 
and  learned  of  Violet's  quarrel  with  Joe,  and  caught  the 
sinister  implication  in  John's  instructions  to  him — Henry 
had  carried  this  vice  of  worrying  to  an  excess  which  he 
was  forced  to  recognize  as  serious.  It  was  hounding  him 
into  a  chronic  insomnia;  it  was  debilitating  his  own  judg 
ment — or  at  least  shaking  his  confidence  in  it,  which  came 
to  the  same  thing. 

This  luncheon  to-day  afforded  an  illustration.  It  was 
one  of  a  series  of  steps  in  a  friendly  advance  on  John's 
part  toward  a  man  with  whom  he  had  severed,  a  few 
months  back,  all  but  the  most  necessary  business  relations. 
The  advance  had  become  perceptible  soon  after  Violet  had 
gone  away,  taking  Margaret  with  her,  to  Italy.  Henry 
wondered  what  that  advance  meant.  It  might  be  nothing 
but  the  natural  rebound  of  John's  innate  kindliness,  now 
that  Violet  was  off  the  board,  toward  a  likable  chap  who 
had  been  hard  hit  by  a  double  stroke  of  misfortune.  It 
might  have  occurred  to  John  to  wonder  how  he  would 
have  felt  if,  simultaneously  with  a  disabling  accident  to 
himself,  Dodo,  were  to  have  run  off  with  Jeffrey. 

On  the  surface,  it  looked  like  that  to  Henry.  He  had 
never  known  John  pleasanter  than  he  was  at  lunch  to-day 
— but  mightn't  it  be  a  part  of  a  deliberate  campaign  to 
keep  Joe  seated  firmly  on  the  rails  that  had  been  greased 
to  his  foreseen  destruction?  When  the  time  came  for 
them  to  hand  Henry  the  part  he  was  expected  to  play  in 
their  little  drama  of  financial  assassination — if  they  did 
hand  it  to  him — what  would  he  do?  "Would  he  have  the 
courage  to  tell  them  to  go  to  hell?  It  literally  made  him 
sweat  whenever  he  asked  himself  that  question — and  he 
had  asked  it  almost  daily  for  months. 

But  for  that  question,  he  would  be  happier  than  he  had 
ever  been  since  his  father's  death.  Life  was  kindlier  than 
it  had  ever  been.  It  had  been  wonderful,  for  instance,  to 
be  able  to  say,  when  Violet  invited  Margaret  to  go  to 
Italy  with  her  as  her  guest,  that  this  arrangement  would 


360         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

not  be  necessary,  and  to  go  and  buy  her  steamship  tickets 
himself.  The  thought  of  subjecting  Margaret  to  a  rever 
sion  from  that  to  the  old  shifting  dependence  was  intol 
erable  ;  yet  this  was  what  a  defiance  of  John  and  a  refusal 
to  play  his  part  would  mean.  Round  and  round  that 
grizzly  maypole  his  thoughts  danced  in  a  contracting  spiral. 
Damn  it,  why  couldn't  he  stop?  He  wasn't  doing  any 
body  any  good. 

It  made  him  nervous  now  to  have  the  two  men  looking 
at  him,  though  there  was  nothing  but  good  will  in  their 
faces.  "Anyhow,"  he  concluded,  after  denying  that  he 
needed  a  vacation,  "I  can't  think  of  any  place  I  particu 
larly  want  to  go.  The  annual  meeting  is  coming  in  a  few 
weeks,  and  I  should  have  to  be  back  for  that.  There 
wouldn't  be  time,  really,  to  go  anywhere." 

"You  could  get  to  Tokio  and  back  before  the  meeting, 
if  you  wanted  to,"  Joe  contradicted.  "Why  don't  you 
go  there?  You'd  have  time  to  pick  a  few  cherry  blossoms, 
and  so  on." 

"  I  '11  tell  you  what  you  might  do, ' '  John  put  in,  speaking 
more  seriously.  "Go  to  Mentone  and  spend  a  couple  of 
weeks  with  Violet  and  Margaret.  Take  them  over  to 
Nice  for  mi-careme.  You'd  just  about  hit  it,  I  think.  I 
wish  you  would  do  that,  for  a  fact.  I'd  like  a  first-hand 
report  on  Violet."  The  speaker  glanced  aside  to  Joe  as 
he  went  on  to  explain,  "She  hasn't  been  very  well  this 
winter — wasn't  at  least  before  she  went  away,  and  her 
letters  don't  answer  my  questions." 

Joe  answered  with  a  proper  assumption  of  concern  that 
he  was  sorry  to  hear  Mrs.  Williamson  had  not  been  well; 
and  there  the  subject  dropped,  leaving  Henry  sunk  in  a 
maze  of  conjecture  as  to  John's  reason  for  bringing  Violet 
into  the  talk. 

As  they  left  the  lunch  table,  John  went  back  quite 
seriously  to  the  project  of  Henry's  vacation.  "Think  it 
over,"  he  commanded.  "There  isn't  a  reason  on  earth,  is 
there"  (the  question  was  directed  to  Joe),  "why  he 
shouldn't  run  over  to  the  Riviera  for  a  couple  of  weeks?" 

"Not  that  I  know  of,"  said  Joe.     And  he  added  with  a 


ROMANCE  361 

grin,  "I'll  stand  without  hitching  for  that  long.  Give  you 
*ny  word,  I  will." 

"  It 's  all  nonsense, ' '  Henry  protested  fretfully,  as  he  and 
Joe  walked  back  to  the  office  together.  "I  couldn't  get 
passage  for  weeks.  Those  Mediterranean  boats  are 
crowded  this  time  of  the  year." 

' '  Leave  that  to  me, ' '  said  Joe ;  and  half  an  hour  later  he, 
brought  into  Henry's  office  a  memorandum  of  the  num 
ber  of  his  berth,  the  name  of  his  steamer,  and  the  date  of 
his  sailing  from  New  York. 

' '  Go  to  the  photographer  down-stairs  now  and  get  mugged 
for  your  passport;  then  you  can  put  in  your  appli 
cation  to-morrow." 

Henry,  in  a  daze,  obeyed. 

Until  his  steamer  cast  off  from  the  wharf  in  New  York 
ten  days  later,  Henry's  mind  did  not  fully  accept  the  fact 
that  he  was  going  to  Europe  again,  after  all  these  years. 
To  glimpse  the  Azores;  buy  oranges  and  things  from  the 
old  women  who  would  come  aboard  at  Gibraltar ;  gaze  once 
more  upon  the  Chateau  d'lf  whence  they  had  chucked 
Monte  Cristo  into  the  sea;  hear  the  banging  of  the  guns 
while  they  shot  pigeons  at  Monte  Carlo;  sit  out  in  the 
Mediterranean  sunshine  under  a  green-lined  pongee  um 
brella,  watching  the  idle  world  go  by — himself  as  idle  as 
the  best  of  them.  He  was  embarked  for  that,  when  a  fort 
night  ago  ...  It  was  queer  the  way  Joe  sent  you  spin 
ning  off  on  some  tangent  or  other  whenever  you  touched 
him. 

He  had  an  even  two  weeks  from  the  day  he  landed  at 
Marseilles  to  the  day  when  he  must  set  sail  for  home  from, 
Genoa,  and  he  feared  he  disappointed  and  offended  Mar 
garet  by  electing  to  devote  the  whole  of  his  time  to  the 
little  strip  of  sun-drenched  and  mountain-sheltered  para 
dise  which  lay  between  these  two  cities.  He  rejected  with 
unconcealed  horror,  Margaret's  suggestion  that  he  make  a 
dash  north  through  France,  for  a  day  or  two  in  Paris,  and 
a  short  tour  of  the  battle-fields;  and  he  dealt  almost  as 
shortly  with  the  compromise  she  offered,  a  trip  across  to 
Venice,  upon  which  she  said  she  would  accompany  him. 


362         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

' '  I  'm  going  to  stay  right  here  in  the  sun, ' '  he  said,  with 
a  decisiveness  which  amazed  her.  "I'm  going  to  pretend 
that  the  rest  of  Europe  is  just  the  way  it  was  twenty  years 
ago,  and  that  I've  got  all  the  time  and  all  the  money  that 
I  need.  That's  the  secret  of  the  Riviera.  It's  the  one 
place  I  know  in  the  world  where  you  can  do  that." 

It  was  in  Violet 's  presence  that  he  made  this  declaration 
of  independence,  and  Margaret  couldn't  say  much.  Later, 
when  she  got  her  brother  by  himself,  she  remonstrated  with 
him  seriously.  His  coming  over  at  all  for  so  short  a  time 
seemed  to  her  a  piece  of  unwarranted  extravagance.  But 
his  refusal  to  make  the  most  of  the  little  time  he  had  was 
simply  perverse.  It  wasn't  like  him.  "It's  like  that  hor 
rible  man  Greer,"  she  went  on.  "I  hope  you  aren't  try 
ing  to  imitate  him." 

Henry  laughed.  "Joe's  suggestion  was,"  he  com 
mented,  ''that  I  run  over  to  Tokio  and  pick  a  few  cherry 
blossoms. '  * 

' '  Cherry  blossoms ! ' '  Margaret  echoed,  with  a  shudder  of 
disgust.  "I  know  what  he  meant  by  that  as  well  as  vou 
do." 

"He  meant  cherry  blossoms,"  Henry  said  quietly.  "If 
he  had  meant  Geisha  girls,  or  whatever  the  polite  name 
for  them  is,  he  would  have  said  so  in  so  many  words. 
Poor  old  Joe!  I  wish  you  would  let  him  alone.  He  has 
been  pretty  hard  hit  this  winter." 

"Well,  I  hope  you  let  him  alone,"  she  retorted;  "es 
pecially  before  Violet.  She  could  tell  you  a  few  things 
about  him  if  she  wanted  to." 

"Has  she  been  telling  them  to  you?"  Henry  asked; 
but  Margaret  denied  that  this  was  the  case. 

"You've  changed  somehow,"  she  concluded.  "You 
aren't  the  same  person  you  were  a  year  ago — whether  it's 
due  to  Mr.  Greer  or  to  somebody  else." 

"Who  else?"  Henry  wondered,  but  he  didn't  ask. 
Anyhow,  Margaret  acquiesced  with  a  pretty  good  grace 
after  that  in  the  frivolous  regime  of  his  vacation.  He  be 
gan  with  a  lucky  day  at  Monte  Carlo,  winning  nearly  four 


ROMANCE  363 

thousand  francs.  This  frightened  him  away  from  the 
salle  de  jeu  for  the  rest  of  his  stay,  but  it  enabled  him  to 
play  the  host  to  the  two  women  with  just  the  degree  of 
modest  lavishness  that  suited  him,  and  with  a  comfortable 
conscience.  Even  Margaret  could  see  the  experience  was 
doing  him  good — refreshing  him,  filling  him  out,  brighten 
ing  his  eyes  and  lending  timbre  to  his  voice. 

For  once,  there  was  a  reversal  of  roles  between  him  and 
Violet.  Henry  had  never  seen  her  look  faded  before. 
Time  had  seemed  to  pass  over  her  frictionless,  leaving  no 
mark  upon  her  whatever;  but  now,  it  was  as  if  some  ob 
scure  reagent  had  been  at  work,  bringing  the  old  marks 
out. 

He  had  been  pretty  skeptical  of  the  ill  health  which  had 
been  alleged  as  the  reason  for  her  going  abroad  just  after 
Christmas.  Mere  restlessness,  he  had  taken  it  to  be.  Bore 
dom  with  the  endless  bridge  she  played.  Perhaps  the 
hope  of  picking  up  another  barytone — or  even  Fournier 
himself.  Henry  had  bestowed  what  sympathy  he  had  to 
spare  in  that  direction  upon  John. 

It  was  plain  to  him  now,  though  the  surface  she  showed 
was  as  crisp  and  finely  finished  as  ever,  that  she  was  pro 
foundly  unhappy.  Was  she  ill,  he  wondered?  Was  some 
threat  hanging  over  her  which  she  dared  not  look  in  the 
face?  Anyhow,  he  was  sorry  for  her,  and  on  the  tide  of 
this  sympathy  there  came  back  his  old  affection  for  her, 
half  cousinly,  half  romantic.  He  betrayed  it  candidly, 
undeterred  by  his  sister's  good-natured — or  almost  good- 
natured — scorn  of  this  relapse. 

He  was  careful  whenever  he  was  with  Violet  to  avoid 
saying  anything  that  even  slanted  toward  Joe  Greer.  He 
had  been  strongly  impressed  that  this  was  a  sensitive  point 
which  must  not  even  be  approached.  But  for  this  convic 
tion,  he  would  have  thought  more  than  once  that  she  had 
given  him  a  lead  toward  Joe.  Certainly,  wishing  to  avoid 
him  as  she  did,  she  showed  less  than  her  characteristic  tact 
in  sometimes  asking  questions  or  recalling  incidents  that 
would  lead  the  unwary  into  his  neighborhood. 


364         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

On  the  morning  of  his  last  day  but  one  in  Mentone,  as 
the  three  of  them  sat  idly  after  breakfast,  looking  out  over 
the  Mediterranean,  Henry  said,  "Two  weeks  from  to-day 
I  shall  be  looking  out  at  Lake  Michigan  from  my  office 
window,  and  it  may  be  just  as  blue  and  nice  as  this — or  it 
may  be  buried  in  a  snow-storm.  There  is  no  monotony 
about  it  back  there,  anyhow." 

' '  I  'm  going  back  with  you, ' '  Violet  said.  ' '  I  wish  you  'd 
go  in  and  telegraph  to  Cook's  to  hold  a  cabin  for  me.  We 
can  all  run  up  to  Nice  this  morning  and  buy  my  ticket. ' ' 

"You  don't  mean  that,  Violet!"  Margaret  cried. 

Violet  nodded.  "I  spent  most  all  last  night  packing," 
she  said.  "I  couldn't  sleep." 

There  was  a  long  silence,  blank  with  the  astonishment  of 
her  two  auditors,  electric,  on  Violet's  part,  with  an  un 
accountable  emotion.  "I  know  it's  horrid,"  she  burst  out 
again,  "but  I  can't  help  it.  I've  got  to  go  back  and  see 
John.  There  are  some  things  I  want  to  talk  with  him 
about."  She  managed,  as  she  turned  to  Margaret,  a  short 
laugh  and  a  drier,  more  matter-of-fact  manner.  "If  I 
stayed  here  another  two  months,  as  we'd  planned,  you'd 
get  to  hating  the  sight  of  me.  I  suppose  Henry  will  be 
fore  he  gets  me  to  New  York,  but  he 's  so  soft  hearted,  he  '11 
forgive  me." 

"I  promised  Portia  Novelli  I'd  buy  some  things  for  her 
in  Italy,"  Margaret  said,  " — furniture  and  glass,  mostly — • 
and  I  think  she's  counting  on  it.  I  don't  see  how  I 
can  ...  If  you'd  just  told  me  a  couple  of  weeks  ago, 
even  .  .  . " 

But  Margaret  mustn't  even  think  of  giving  up  the  rest 
of  the  trip  to  come  home  with  her,  Violet  interrupted, 
excitedly.  It  would  be  too  silly!  Of  course  she  must  go 
on  and  carry  out  the  plans  the  pair  of  them  had  made 
together.  It  wasn't  merely  a  matter  of  carrying  out  Por 
tia's  commissions.  Harriet  Aldrich  was  expecting  them  in 
Rome,  and  with  old  friends  like  Anne  Duncan  and  her 
husband  right  here  in  Mentone,  Margaret  wouldn't  feel 
abandoned,  would  she? 


ROMANCE  365 

Henry  was  uneasily  aware  that  Violet's  volubility  was 
not  producing  the  effect  it  aimed  at  with  Margaret.  If 
she  said  much  more,  Margaret  would  make  it  an  affair  of 
conscience,  decide  that  Violet  needed  her,  and  cut  her 
own  vacation  short.  Either  that,  or  begin  thinking  Violet 
was  trying  to  get  rid  of  her !  He  knew  his  sister  extraordi 
narily  well. 

He  now  interposed  to  say  that  Portia's  commissions  did 
not  strike  him  as  important  enough  to  go  to  Italy  for,  in 
case  Margaret,  herself,  had  had  enough  of  Europe  for  the 
present,  and  felt  like  coming  back  with  them.  It  would 
be  awfully  nice  to  have  her  at  home  once  more.  She  had 
better  take  a  day  to  think  it  over,  then  decide  on  the  sole 
basis  of  her  own  preference.  He  was  sure  there  would  be 
room  on  the  steamer  homeward  bound  at  this  time  of  year. 

"When  he  was  alone,  he  questioned  his  own  motives  for 
this  interposition  a  little  uneasily.  Had  he  been  wholly 
unselfish  in  trying  to  save  Margaret  from  being  worried 
or  provoked  into  making  a  decision  contrary  to  her  real 
choice,  or  was  it  perhaps  true  that  the  prospect  of  ten 
days  at  sea  alone  with  Violet  attracted  him — the  after 
math  of  that  old  romance?  He  was  able,  however,  to  in 
terrupt  this  train  of  thought  \vith  the  audacious  reflec 
tion  that  it  didn't  in  the  least  matter  what  his  motives  had 
been.  What  he  had  done  had  been  to  make  it  possible 
for  Margaret  to  choose  for  herself.  If  it  worked  out  to 
giving  a  little  extra  fillip  to  his  enjoyment  of  his  vacation, 
where  was  the  harm? 

Margaret  decided  she  would  stay  on,  long  enough  at 
least  to  do  Portia's  shopping  for  her.  She  was  really  get 
ting  interested  in  the  possibilities  of  the  decorating  and 
furnishing  business,  she  said,  especially  since  knocking 
around  New  England  with  Portia  last  summer.  She  knew, 
it  happened,  quite  a  lot  about  Italian  stuff,  and  if  her 
purchases  were  as  sound  as  she  hoped  they  would  be,  who 
knew  but  it  might  result  in  her  getting  a  commission  to 
come  over  again  next  year — possibly  in  her  going  in  with 
Portia  as  a  partner? 


She  went  down  to  Genoa  to  see  Henry  and  Violet  off, 
and  left  them  with  a  humorous  injunction  to  be  as  senti 
mental  as  they  liked.  She  would  feel  a  lot  safer  about 
Henry,  she  concluded,  tied  to  Violet's  innocent  apron 
strings  than  ranging  about  Chicago  on  the  loose. 

When  the  flurry  of  departure  was  over,  and  they  were 
seated  side  by  side  in  their  deck  chairs,  Violet  reverted  to 
that  last  remark  of  Margaret's,  and  commented  upon  it. 
"I  think  it  does  frighten  her  a  little — the  people  you've 
been  playing  around  with  in  Chicago  lately." 

"I  suppose  your  opinion  of  those  people  is  the  same  as 
hers, ' '  he  said,  after  waiting  half  a  minute  to  take  thought. 
Then,  "Look  here,  Violet,  do  you  want  me  to  talk  about 
this  ?  You  made  it  pretty  clear  to  me  one  night  last  sum 
mer,  I  thought,  that  you  didn't." 

She  said  quickly  in  rather  a  thin  voice,  ' '  I  don 't  want  to 
talk  about  anything,  Henry,  except  how  nice  and  blue  the 
sky  is,  and  whether  we  shall  have  a  chance  to  go  ashore  at 
Gibraltar,  and  what  time  it  is  when  they  ring  fire  bells. 
Unless  you  feel  like  remembering  old  times — and  holding 
my  hand  once  in  a  while.  Not  being  sentimental  about 
us,  the  way  we  are  now,  you  know,  but  about  the  pair 
of  kids  we  were  that  summer  in  France.  Gracious,  what 
a  time  ago  that  seems!  I'll  bet  you've  forgotten  all  about 
it." 

He  did  not  hold  her  hand,  since  it  was  his  observation 
of  her  that  she  didn't  always  like  to  be  taken  literally 
when  she  threw  out  invitations  like  that;  but  he  did  with 
smiling  gravity  set  about  disproving  her  assertion  that 
he  had  forgotten.  He  recalled  a  day  at  Chenonceau  when, 
tired  of  Diane  de  Poictiers,  they  had  given  the  others  the 
slip,  and  embarked  on  the  Cher  in  a  canoe  he  found. 

He  noticed  she  was  not  contributing  much  to  their  com 
mon  stock  of  reminiscences.  Either  she  had  forgotten  a 
good  deal,  or  she  didn  't  care  to  acknowledge  her  memories ; 
and  it  was  with  an  enthusiasm  suggestive  of  relief  that  she 
greeted  a  pair  of  promenaders  walking  by.  New  York 
people  they  were — parents  of  a  girl  in  Dorothy's  class  at 


ROMANCE  367 

Thorny  croft.  She  hadn't  known  before  that  they  were 
aboard. 

"Thank  heaven,"  she  cried,  "now  we  can  have  some 
bridge!" 

They  didn't  see  much  of  the  Mediterranean  after  that, 
nor  the  blue  sky;  and  they  pretty  well  ignored  Gibraltar, 
though  they  swung  for  hours  in  the  very  shadow  of  it. 

Henry  didn't  mind.  To  his  astonishment,  he  found 
himself  enjoying  the  smoke-room.  His  knowledge  of 
bridge  had  always  been  sound,  and  the  •weakness  of  his 
play  temperamental.  "What  made  the  difference  now  was 
the  hundred  dollars  or  so  that  was  left  of  his  winnings  at 
Monte  Carlo.  This  was  velvet.  He  could  lose  it  with  a 
clear  conscience.  When  it  was  lost,  he  would  stop  play 
ing. 

But  he  didn  't  lose.  For  days  he  consistently  held  better 
than  average  hands,  and  he  played  them  resolutely — for 
all  they  were  worth.  Meanwhile,  he  had  followed  the 
others  in  putting  his  sovereign  into  the  ship's  pool.  For 
several  days  the  numbers  he  drew  seemed  to  him  unlikely, 
and  he  didn't  bid  them  in.  But  at  last  one  night,  when 
they  weren't  more  than  two  days  out  of  New  York,  he 
drew  a  number  that  struck  him  as  propitious,  and  fortified 
by  another  good  day  at  the  bridge  table,  protected  it 
though  it  cost  him  around  twenty  pounds  to  do  so.  It  was 
the  last  pool  on  the  voyage,  and  the  play  was  high. 

He  wasn't  particularly  surprised,  when  the  run  was 
posted  just  before  lunch  next  day,  to  find  that  he  had 
won.  Somehow,  he  had  thought  he  would;  but  he  was 
shocked  at  the  amount  of  his  winnings.  Heavens,  there 
was  enough  here  to  pay  for  his  whole  trip,  and  a  good  deal 
of  Margaret's  in  the  bargain! 

It  was  hard  not  to  act  apologetic  about  it,  and  to  ride 
down  a  misgiving  that  some  of  the  other  passengers  might 
be  wondering  if  he  wasn't  a  professional  gambler. 

Violet  hadn't  appeared  yet  that  day,  and  after  lunch  he 
permitted  himself  to  be  involved  in  a  strictly  masculine 
bridge  game,  which  he  sat  down  to  in  the  unavowed  hope  of 


368         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

losing  some  of  his  guilty  gains.  The  cards  ran  strongly 
his  way,  however,  and  he  went  right  on  winning,  though 
the  game  was  protracted  straight  through  the  dinner  hour 
and  on  into  the  evening. 

After  dinner,  Violet  appeared  in  the  smoke-room  with 
her  two  New  York  friends  and  an  odd  man — a  bearded  for 
eigner  in  some  diplomatic  service  or  other — and  this  four 
started  a  game  of  their  own. 

Toward  eleven  o'clock,  the  steward  brought  Henry  a 
note  from  Violet.  "Come  and  get  me  out  of  this,"  it 
read.  "I  can't  stand  any  more  of  it." 

"I  hate  beards,"  she  said,  as  he  steadied  her  across  the 
high  sill  to  the  companionway.  "I  don't  see  why  people 
wear  them."  It  was  an  unpleasant  night — misty, 
splashed  with  occasional  squalls  of  rain,  and  the  dark 
decks  were  almost  deserted.  She  spoke  as  if  her  teeth 
were  chattering  with  cold;  and  he  wondered  in  frank  per 
plexity  what  he  was  going  to  do  with  her. 

"You  aren't  well,"  he  said.  "What  you  really  ought 
to  do  is  take  a  big  drink  of  whisky,  and  turn  in. ' ' 

"Turn  in!"  she  echoed  derisively.  "Go  to  sleep  like  a 
good  child  and  forget  my  nonsense — and  feel  all  right  in 
the  morning?  You  aren't  going  to  be  rid  of  me  as  easily 
as  that.  Come  down  with  me  while  I  get  my  fur  coat 
and  an  extra  rug  or  two ;  and  then  we  '11  find  a  couple  of 
chairs  in  a  dry  corner,  and  be  comfortable." 

She  had  a  big  outside  cabin,  one  deck  down,  which 
opened  by  means  of  a  short  transverse  corridor  right  out 
on  deck.  At  this  outer  door,  he  stopped. 

"Come  on  in,"  she  commanded,  "and  help  me  carry 
out  the  things.  You  haven 't  seen  my  room,  anyway,  have 
you?  It's  rather  nice." 

She  was  feeling  her  way  ahead  of  her  in  the  dark.  Now 
she  switched  on  a  shaded  lamp  on  the  night  stand.  It 
was  a  charming  room,  fantastically  big  for  a  steamer's 
cabin — brass  bed,  chaise  longue,  easy  chairs,  even  (ludi 
crously)  a  fireplace.  He  exclaimed  at  it  in  admiration. 

"It  would  be  nice,"  she  said,  "if  we  could  sit  and  talk 


ROMANCE  369 

right  here."  But  then,  at  the  look  in  his  face,  she 
laughed.  "I  don't  mean  it,  Henry,  so  don't  get  fright 
ened.  It's  no  good  starting  a  scandal  unless  you're  going 
to  have  a  run  for  your  money." 

She  pulled  her  big  fur  coat  out  of  the  wardrobe,  as  she 
spoke,  let  him  help  her  into  it,  indicated  the  rugs  he  was 
to  bring  along,  and  switched  off  the  light.  He  waited 
until  she  was  clear  of  the  door  before  he  attempted  to 
follow  her  out,  and  he  heard  her  give  another  short  laugh 
when,  after  a  moment's  hesitation,  she  had  preceded  him. 
They  found  a  pair  of  chairs  just  outside  her  window. 
After  he  had  tucked  her  up  in  the  rug,  he  asked  whether 
he  shouldn  't  go,  after  all,  and  get  the  drink  he  had  spoken 
of. 

"No,"  she  said,  "whisky  wouldn't  do  me  any  good  to 
night.  I'm  not  cold,  anyhow.  Sit  down.  I  don't  want 
you  to  go  away."  She  added,  after  he  had  wrapped  his 
own  rug  around  him  and  settled  himself  beside  her,  "I'm 
afraid.  That's  all  the  matter  with  me." 

She  didn't  immediately  answer  when  he  asked  quickly, 
"What  of?" 

"1  have  been  wanting  to  talk  to  you  all  the  way  across. 
That's  why  I  got  rid  of  Margaret,  and  came  away  with 
you.  Now  we  're  nearly  to  New  York  and  I  haven 't  talked 
to  you  yet.  I  knew  unless  I  did  something  desperate  to 
night,  I  wouldn't." 

"You  don't  mean,"  he  said,  with  a  laugh,  "that  you've 
been  afraid  of  me?  Why,  good  heavens,  I'm — only 
Henry!" 

She  echoed,  "Only  Henry,"  and  matched  his  laugh. 
"I  should  think  you'd  have  hated  me  all  these  years.  I 
would  have  if  I'd  been  you.  You  aren't  'only  Henry' 
though,  any  more.  I  guess  that's  why  I've  been  afraid 
of  you.  You're  different,  somehow.  I  didn't  notice  it  at 
Mentone,  when  Margaret  was  talking  about  it,  but  since 
we've  been  on  the  boat,  I've  seen  it  plainly  enough. 
You're  a  terrific  bridge  player.  I  don't  believe  John  ever 
won  as  much  money  on  a  trip  as  you  must  have. ' ' 


370         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

He  remarked  that  no  one  could  be  more  surprised  at 
this  phenomenon  than  he,  himself.  "But  it  isn't  that  I 
am  different,"  he  went  on  reflectively.  "I've  been  ad 
miring  some  people  all  my  life  for  their  nerve,  wishing  I 
could  be  courageous  and  resolute  as  they  were.  I've  just 
found  out  how  easy  it  is  to  play  the  game  that  way  when 
you're  doing  it  all  the  while  on  velvet.  If  I  had  happened 
to  lose  the  hundred  francs  that  I  had  decided  to  blow  in  on 
a  little  thrill  at  Monte  Carlo,  I  would  have  gone  right  on 
being  the  same  harmless  little  piker — that's  the  word, 
isn't  it? — that  you've  always  known  me  for.  But  I  never 
did  lose  it.  I  was  always  ahead.  I  had  quite  a  little  of 
it  left — money  that  I  didn't  think  of  as  really  mine,  you 
know — when  we  came  aboard.  I  had  meant  to  turn  it  over 
to  Margaret,  but  I  didn't  somehow.  Now,  of  course,  I've 
still  got  it — it  and  a  whole  lot  more.  I've  never  really 
had  anything  at  stake,  you  see." 

He  ended  a  reflective  pause  with  a  short  laugh.  "Up 
in  the  smoke-room  to-day  when  the  steward  posted  the 
run,  I  saw  a  little  Englishman  admiring  me  for  my  un 
concern  over  winning  a  great  lot  of  money  like  that.  I 
thought  it  was  ridiculous  that  he  should,  until  it  came  over 
me  that  a  lot  of  people  I  had  envied  and  admired  for  their 
nerve  were  really  just  like  me — just  like  what  I  happened 
for  this  once  to  be,  I  mean.  People  who  have  nothing  at 
stake ;  people,  some  of  them,  who  have  never  been  on  any 
thing  but  velvet  all  their  lives.  It  must  be  rather  an  easy 
game  to  play,  I  think — the  whole  game  of  success — when 
there  isn  't  any  real  penalty  for  losing. ' ' 

"People  like  John,  you  mean,"  she  interrupted,  and 
startled  him  into  a  horrified  disclaimer.  He  had  never 
thought  of  John  like  that. 

"It's  true,  however,"  she  said  flatly.  "It  really  is 
true  of  most  of  us  stall-fed  people.  And  you've  been 
thrown  with  us  always;  never  had  a  chance  to  get  away 
from  us  until  lately.  But  you've  kept  up  your  courage 
and  never  complained  about  how  hard  it  must  have  been. 
Henry,  have  you  got  a  good  big  handkerchief?  Oh,  don't 


ROMANCE  371 

you  care!  I  was  sure  to  have  cried  about  something  to 
night." 

She  went  on  after  she  had  wiped  her  eyes  and  got  her 
voice  under  control  again.  "Anyhow,  you  are  different. 
I  don't  believe  you'd  ever  have  thought  of  a  thing  like 
that  if  you  hadn't  known  Joe  Greer.  He  hates  us,  I  think. 
I  know  he  despises  us. — Doesn't  he?  Hasn't  he  told  you 
so?" 

It  struck  him  as  strange  that  he  wasn't  surprised  at 
her  deliberately  bringing  Joe's  name  into  their  talk — let 
alone  upon  this  note.  It  seemed  to  him  now  that  he  had 
known  from  the  first  whom  she  had  wanted  to  talk  with 
him  about.  Not  as  Margaret's  "that  man  Greer,"  either. 
As  Joe.  He  answered  her  question  rather  at  random, 
aware  that  it  didn't  matter  what  he  said.  It  wasn't  in 
formation  she  wanted. 

"Joe  is  a  good  deal  of  a  boy  in  some  ways,"  he  said. 
"I  don't  believe  his  bite  is  ever  as  bad  as  his  bark;  and 
as  far  as  I  know,  he  has  never  even  barked  at  you.  He 
used  to  turn  loose  pretty  gorgeously  on  the  subject  of 
John  every  now  and  then,  but  he  hasn't  been  doing  that 
lately.  They  seemed  on  the  best  of  terms  when  I  left 
Chicago.  It  was  when  we  were  all  three  having  lunch 
together  that  they  talked  me  into  this  vacation." 

He  heard  her  draw  in  a  long  tremulous  breath,  and  on 
a  quite  genuine  impulse  of  affection,  he  reached  under  her 
rug  and  found  her  hand. 

"Come  along  with  the  talk,"  he  commanded.  "I  can't 
seem  very  formidable  to  you,  even  though  I  did  win  the 
pool  to-day." 

"John  is  the  person  I  ought  to  talk  to,"  she  said,  "but 
I  never  can  do  it.  I've  been  having  some  awfully  queer 
feelings  about  John  lately.  They're  what  I'm  frightened 
about,  I  suppose.  I've  always  known  him  so  well,  you 
see.  Twenty  years — more  than  half  my  life.  "We've  got 
on  awfully  well — as  well  as  any  two  people  ever  do,  I 
guess.  He  has  been  frightfully  kind  to  me.  Generous, 
and  considerate,  too — in  ways  that  lots  of  husbands  aren't 


372         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

from  what  I  hear.  And  of  course  everybody  thinks  the 
•world  of  him — men  and  women — you  and  the  Whitneys, 
and  the  Crawfords,  and  Rose  and  Rodney — everybody  that 
really  knows  him.  He's  an  old  peach.  I'm  a  lot  luckier 
than  I  deserve  to  be,  I  guess.  But  lately,  he's  looked 
different  to  me,  somehow." 

"How's  he  changed?"  Henry  asked. 

"That's  it.  He  hasn't  changed  a  bit.  He's  always 
been  just  the  way  I  see  him  now.  There  are  some  things 
he  never  could  understand.  There's  one  he  misunder 
stands  now — and  the  more  he  tries  to  make  it  right,  the 
worse  it  gets ;  and  the  more  I  try  to  make  him  let  it  alone, 
the  more  he  misunderstands.  It's  about  that  quarrel  I 
had  with  Mr.  Greer  last  summer."  She  added  quickly, 
forestalling  his  attempt  to  speak,  "It  isn't  him  I  care 
about.  It's  John.  You  know  about  it,  I  suppose?" 

"A  little,"  Henry  admitted. 

"Did  he  tell  you  about  it,"  she  demanded  sharply,  "or 
was  it  John?" 

"Joe  never  mentioned  the  thing.  John  gave  me  his 
view  of  it  the  night  we  went  to  Ravinia  to  hear  Thais." 

"His  view!"  Violet  echoed  bitterly.  "Well,  that's  the 
whole  trouble.  I'm  going  to  tell  you  what  really  hap 
pened.  It  isn't  very  nice  to  talk  about.  I  was  furious 
with  him."  (Henry  frowned  in  the  dark,  and  then  per 
ceived  that  "him"  unless  otherwise  explained  had  its  ante 
cedent  in  Joe  Greer.)  "I  never  was  angrier  in  my  life — 
nor  had  a  better  right  to  be.  Because  of  course  he  is  a 
terrible  outsider  in  lots  of  ways.  And  the  people  he  goes 
with — the  women — chorus-girls  and  corset  models!  And 
he  never  bothers  to  make  any  pretense  about  it.  There 
isn  't  one  scrap  of  niceness  in  him,  that  way.  So  of  course, 
with  him,  it  was  natural  enough — the  thing  that  happened, 
I  mean.  It  was  my  fault  in  a  way,  because  I  might  have 
known.  Only  when  you're  with  him,  you  forget  that 
side  of  him." 

She  stuck  fast  at  that  point  for  a  minute  or  two,  but 
Henry,  without  trying  to  prompt  her,  sat  still  and  waited 


ROMANCE  373 

— and  continued  to  hold  her  hand.  He  had  to  overcome 
a  tendency  also  to  hold  his  own  breath. 

''Why,  this  is  what  happened,"  she  went  on  at  last. 
"We  were  driving  along  in  his  car,  you  know,  with  the 
curtain  down  because  of  the  cloud-burst,  and  we  slid  off 
the  road  and  couldn't  go  on  for  a  while.  He  got  the  idea 
that  I  was  trying  to  flirt  with  him.  I  don't  mean  that 
exactly — worse  than  that.  He  thought  I  was  making — 
advances  to  him.  Like  one  of  his  beastly  chorus-girls,  I 
suppose."  She  uttered  a  ragged  little  laugh.  "He  was 
shocked!  He  began  preaching  me  a  sermon.  I  didn't 
know  what  he  meant  at  first.  How  should  I?  When  I 
saw  what  was  in  his  mind — the  beastly  rotten  thing  that 
was  in  his  mind — I  felt  as  if  he  had  thrown  me  out  in  the 
mud  and  was  wiping  his  feet  on  me.  I  told  him  if  he 
said  another  word,  I  'd  get  out  of  the  car  and  go  find  some 
body  to  come  back  and  kill  him.  I  felt  like  killing  him 
myself.  Well,  he  stopped  then,  and  after  a  while  it 
cleared  a  little,  and  we  went  on  and  caught  up  with  John 
and  Dorothy. 

"He  wanted  to  go  into  the  house  and  see  John,  he  said. 
I  don't  know  what  he  meant  to  do.  You  never  can  tell, 
with  him,  what  he  will  do.  He  may  have  wanted  to  make 
his  little  speech  to  John.  I  suppose  he  was  as  angry  by 
that  time  as  I  was.  Or  perhaps  he  only  wanted  to  go  in 
and  look  at  him — register  virtue.  But  I  knew  if  he  did  go 
in,  something  would  happen.  And  he  kept  on  meaning 
to  do  it  right  up  to  the  very  door.  It  was  the  most  hor 
rible  thing  that  ever  happened  to  me.  At  the  very  last 
second  before  John  opened  the  door,  he  went  back  to  the 
car  and  drove  off. 

"It  left  me  looking  like  a  wreck.  I  couldn't  help  that. 
I  was  simply  speechless  for  a  while — what  with  Dodo 
looking  on,  and  all.  Scared  half  to  death,  the  child  was. 
Maybe  if  I  could  have  talked  to  John  alone,  then,  I  could 
have  told  him  what  really  happened ;  but  it  wouldn  't  have 
been  especially  easy  even  then.  Men  are  a  lot  alike  in 
those  things.  But  with  Dodo  there,  it  wasn't  possible. 


374 

"Afterward,  I  did  try  to  talk  to  John  about  it.  I  said 
we  had  had  a  quarrel,  and  gone  into  the  ditch ;  and  it  was 
going  into  the  ditch  that  rattled  me,  I  said.  I  hated  Joe 
and  never  wanted  to  see  him  again;  but  I  gave  John  my 
solemn  word  that  nothing  had  happened,  and  there  was 
nothing  to  make  a  fuss  about.  I  wanted  the  whole  thing 
let  alone,  and  I  wanted  to  be  let  alone  about  it. 

"But  you  see,  John  wouldn't  let  it  alone.  He  couldn't, 
I  suppose.  He  hasn't  got  a  quick  temper — like  mine  or 
Joe  Greer's.  He  just  keeps  on  stewing — slow  but  sure.  I 
knew  what  he  thought.  He  thought  Joe  had  tried  to  take 
some  horrible  advantage  of  me.  But  I  couldn't  very  well 
explain  that  he  hadn't.  You  can  see  that,  can't  you? 
Besides,  I  didn't  want  to  explain.  I  didn't  want  to  talk 
about  him  at  all.  I  was  just  about  as  furious  with  him,  I 
guess,  as  I  would  have  been  over  what  John  thought  it 
was.  Of  course,  I  suppose  he  thinks  that's  what  I  told 
John — a  regular  Potiphar's  wife  affair. 

"I  don't  care  about  that;  really,  I  don't,  Henry.  It's 
John  that's  driving  me  wild  about  it.  He  means  to  get 
even  with  Joe.  He  as  good  as  told  me  so,  by  way  of 
making  me  feel  all  right  about  it  again.  I  don't  have  to 
worry,  he  says.  He  is  going  to  get  his  deserts.  But  do 
you  know  how  I  believe  he  means  to  get  even  ? ' '  She  tried 
to  laugh,  but  sobbed  instead.  "By  taking  his  money  away 
from  him,  or  fixing  it  so  he  can't  get  rich  out  of  your 
beastly  linen  company.  I  don't  know  anything,  really. 
It's  just  hints.  I  am  to  be  patient,  and  wait  and  see — and 
it  will  all  come  right.  Right! 

"Well,  there  you  are.  I  guess  you've  got  it  all  now. 
Maybe  you  can  see  how  I  feel  about  John."  Her  hold  on 
Henry's  hand  tightened  into  a  frenzied  clutch.  "If  John 
thought  what  he  does  think,  and  if  he  really  cared  for  me, 
myself,  he'd  take  Joe  Greer  out  and  shoot  him.  But  he's 
going  to  take  his  money  away  from  him  instead, — and  keep 
it!  And  it's  just  what  John  would  do,  Henry.  That  is 
the  horrible  thing  I've  come  to  see.  Can  you  imagine 
how  it  will  look  to  Joe  when  it  has  all  happened?  Can 


ROMANCE  375 

you  see  what  he'll  think  about  both  of  us,  John  and  me? 
Well,  I  think  just  about  the  same  thing  he  will.  That's 
what  I'm  thinking  now." 

Always  the  first  thing  in  Henry  to  respond  to  any  ap 
peal  was  his  tenderness.  He  saw  Violet's  predicament — 
part  of  it,  anyhow.  Incidentally,  it  was  hours  before  he 
perceived  his  own.  "I'm  sure,"  he  began,  "that  John 
believes  exactly  what  you  told  him,  and  what  he  after 
ward  told  me — that  Joe  had  not  committed  or  attempted 
any  crime ;  that  he  had  done  nothing,  I  mean,  that  required 
to  be  acted  upon.  He  was  angry  with  himself,  first  of 
all,  so  he  said  to  me,  for  having  put  you  in  a  position 
where  an  unpleasant  experience  could  happen  to  you ;  and 
I  think  he  was  held  back  from  doing  anything  overt  by 
his  feeling  that  you  wouldn  't  want  it  done  that  way.  And 
then  you've  got  to  remember  that  he's  John,  just  as  much 
as  Joe's  Joe.  There  isn't  the  slightest  doubt  he  cares  for 
you." 

"Who?"  she  asked  sharply.  Then  in  the  same  breath, 
"Oh,  John  you  mean.  Yes,  of  course  he  does — in  his 
way. ' ' 

"It's  the  only  way  he  has,"  Henry  remarked,  a  little  at 
random,  for  that  "who"  of  hers  had  startled  him. 

"Henry,"  she  asked,  after  a  silence,  "has  he  ever  said 
anything  about  me  to  you  at  all  since  the  day  he  was 
hurt,  and  that  daughter  of  his  eloped  in  an  aeroplane  ? ' ' 

To  the  best  of  his  memory,  he  told  her,  Joe  had  not  said 
a  word. 

"Because,"  she  explained,  "I  did  a  rather  crazy  thing. 
I  went  to  see  him  about  a  week  after  it  happened.  His 
butler  came  to  the  door  and  said  Mr.  Greer  wasn't  seeing 
anybody.  I  didn't  leave  a  card  or  anything,  but  I'm  sure 
the  man  knows  me.  I  wondered  if  he  had  told  Joe.  It 
seemed  as  if  I  had  to  do  something." 

"The  thing  you've  got  to  do,"  Henry  said,  "for  your 
own  peace  of  mind,  is  to  talk  to  John.  Explain  the  whole 
thing;  tell  him  what  really  happened  in  the  car  that  day, 
just  as  you've  told  it  to  me." 


376         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"I  can't  tell  him,"  she  answered  desperately.  "Not 
now;  he  wouldn't  believe  me.  Think  how  it  would  look 
after  all  these  months!  He'd  think  I  had  fallen  in  love 
with  Joe,  and  was  trying  to  shield  him.  It's  idiotic  of 
course,  but  that 's  what  he  'd  think.  Any  man  would — any 
husband.  No,  I've  told  it  to  you,  and  you're  the  only  per 
son  I  could  possibly  tell  it  to.  You've  got  to  talk  to  John 
yourself. — Or  to  somebody." 

Of  course  there  could  be  no  doubt  what  "somebody" 
she  meant.  Henry  was  touched  by  the  almost  childish 
naivete  of  this.  He  felt  frightfully  sorry  for  Violet,  but 
he  hadn't  at  the  time  taken  very  seriously  her  apparent 
intention  to  involve  him  in  the  matter.  She  brought  this 
home  to  him  though,  two  days  later  when  they  parted  in 
New  York.  She  was  stopping  off  for  a  day  or  two  to  visit 
Dorothy  at  school,  while  Henry  of  course  was  going 
straight  through  to  Chicago.  She  prolonged  their  final 
handshake  to  say,  "You're  a  dear,  Henry,  to  come  to  the 
rescue  with  John  and  Mr.  Greer.  I've  begun  sleeping  again 
since  you  said  you'd  fix  it  up  for  me.  I  don't  care  whom 
you  talk  to,  you  knoAV,  as  long  as  you  tell  somebody.  I  don't 
deserve  to  have  you  kind  to  me  like  that.  That's  the  way 
you  are.  Good-by.  I'll  see  you  in  Chicago  as  soon  as  I 
come  back." 

She  was  gone  before  her  cousin,  bewildered  at  first, 
and  then  aghast,  could  utter  a  disclamatory  word. 

4 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  Violet  had  slept  that  night,  for 
Henry  in  his  berth  on  the  Chicago  train  lay  broad  awake 
till  morning,  thinking  anything  but  kindly  thoughts  of  his 
confiding  cousin.  That  the  thing  she,  without  disguise, 
expected  him  to  do  looked  no  doubt  simple  enough  to  her, 
was  a  minor  exasperation  in  his  dilemma. 

Violet  had  not  meant  to  make  Joe  look  like  a  criminal 
in  her  husband's  eyes.  She  had  assured  him,  in  fact,  that 
this  was  not  the  case;  but  she  hadn't  been  able  to  uproot 
John's  misconception.  John  persisted  in  regarding  Joe 


ROMANCE  377 

as  an  enemy.  John  was  planning  to  get  even  with  him 
through  the  channels  of  business — the  precise  method  of 
his  attack  unknown — and  Joe  was  to  take  warning,  and 
look  out  for  himself.  This  was  the  substance  of  what 
Violet  wanted  Henry  to  tell  Joe  as  soon  as  he  reached 
Chicago. 

Simple  enough,  as  far  as  Violet  could  see.  "What  she 
couldn't  see — and  her  vestigial  sense  of  fair  play  would 
never  have  given  her  a  hint  of  it — was  the  price  Henry 
would  have  to  pay.  To  square  this  procedure  with  his  own 
obligatory  loyalty  to  John,  he  would  have  to  go  to  John 
and  tell  him  substantially  what  he  had  done;  acknow 
ledge,  in  other  words,  that  he  had  gone  over  to  the 
enemy.  Such  an  admission  would  justify  John  in  calling 
him  a  turncoat,  a  traitor,  and  an  ungrateful  whelp.  It 
would  justify  him,  too,  in  stripping  Henry  summarily  of 
his  job,  and  chucking  him  out  in  a  cold  world  to  fend  for 
himself.  It  was  exactly  the  situation  that  he  had  caught 
a  glimpse  of  one  summer  night  last  year,  and  had  shrunk 
from  as  a  nightmare. 

To  Violet,  of  course,  he  owed  no  such  sacrifice  as  this. 
It  would  be  simple  idiocy  to  make  it — for  her.  He  would 
be  fully  justified  in  telling  her,  or  in  writing  her  a  note  to 
say,  that  he  could  not  undertake  the  errand  she  had 
charged  him  with,  and  that  she  had  mistaken  him  if  she 
thought  he  had  agreed  to  do  it.  There  was  nothing  more 
to  it  than  that,  as  far  as  Violet  was  concerned.  But  it 
wasn't  Violet  that  he  was  concerned  about.  It  was  poor 
old  Joe. 

He  had  tried  often  enough,  but  never  successfully,  to 
account  for  the  warmth  of  affection  for  Joe  that  had  grown 
up  in  him  during  the  past  year.  It  was  not  based  on 
gratitude.  John  Williamson  was  the  person  he  had  been 
grateful  to  for  half  his  life,  while  Joe  had  never  gone  out 
of  his  way  appreciably  to  be  of  service  to  him.  Still  less 
was  it  based  on  congruities  of  taste  and  temper.  It  would 
hardly  be  possible  to  find  two  men  more  widely  different, 
if  one  judged  by  their  surfaces  anyhow,  than  he  and  Joe. 


378         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Surfaces  were  perhaps  misleading.  Henry  had  often 
recalled  their  first  talk  together,  which  Joe  had  begun  by 
asking  him  to  explain  John  Williamson.  Henry  could 
still  recall  the  surprising  sensation  he  had  of  being  under 
stood,  taken  at  an  unwonted  value.  This  sense,  though  it 
has  ceased  to  be  surprising,  had  never  faded  to  the  point 
where  he  was  unconscious  of  it.  He  had  never  left  Joe, 
even  after  the  briefest  encounter  without  being  aware  of 
an  enhanced  confidence  in  himself.  Margaret  made  no 
bones  of  calling  this  feeling  of  his  an  infatuation.  Joe 
flattered  him,  she  said,  deliberately ;  and  she  sometimes  im 
plied  that  this  was  being  done  for  a  sinister  purpose. 

This,  with  due  deference  to  Margaret's  opinion,  Henry 
knew  to  be  nonsense.  Just  as  unadulterated  nonsense  as 
some  of  the  ideas  Margaret  entertained  about  Jennie  Mae- 
Arthur.  Joe  wouldn't  take  the  trouble  to  flatter  anybody. 
Candor  was  outstanding  among  his  qualities,  and  was  often 
carried  to  outrageous  lengths.  No,  Joe  liked  him ;  was  his 
friend;  had  been  from  the  day  of  their  first  meeting. 
"Whatever  the  basis  of  it,  there  the  thing  was — not  to  be 
explained  away.  It  was  unique,  too,  in  Henry 's  experience. 
He  had  never  formed  a  friendship  of  just  that  quality  with 
any  other  man. 

"Well,  this  was  what  the  situation  boiled  down  to — a 
choice  between  technical  loyalty  to  John  and  his  real  loy 
alty  to  Joe  Greer.  It  wasn't  fair  to  blame  Violet  for  his 
quandary.  She  didn't  enter  into  the  situation  at  all.  She 
had  told  him  nothing  about  John's  intentions  in  their  talk 
on  deck  that  night,  that  John  himself  had  not  made  clear 
to  him — clear  enough  at  least — the  night  they  had  heard 
Thais  at  Ravinia.  For  the  present,  John  had  said,  it 
wasn't  feasible  to  get  rid  of  Joe.  He  would  be  indispen 
sable  to  their  enterprise,  at  least  for  another  year.  Henry, 
meanwhile,  was  to  keep  on  good  terms  with  him,  quiet  his 
suspicions,  see  that  he  didn't,  as  John  put  it,  leave  the 
rails. 

And  Henry,  without  spoken  protest,  had  received  the 
instructions!  It  would  be  fair  to  say,  he  supposed,  that 


ROMANCE  379 

he  had  acted  upon  them.  Certainly  he  had  given  Joe  no 
intimation  of  anything  amiss.  He  had  worried  himself 
half  sick  about  it,  to  be  sure.  But  there  was  no  merit  in 
that;  none  that  Joe  would  be  able  to  see  when  the  mine — 
whatever  it  was — that  they  were  planting  under  him 
should  be  sprung. 

It  was  a  rotten  situation.  Intolerable,  whatever  the  al 
ternative  consequences  should  turn  out  to  be.  He  would 
put  an  end  to  it  somehow  as  soon  as  he  reached  Chicago 
— before  the  annual  meeting.  Their  mine  likely  enough 
was  timed  to  go  off  upon  that  occasion.  That  may  have 
been  John's  reason  for  packing  him  off  to  Europe.  A 
week  from  now — oh,  sooner  than  that ;  next  Monday  morn 
ing — he  would  be  out  looking  for  a  job. 

He  dared  not  let  himself  think  about  that.  When  he 
glanced  ahead  at  that  prospect,  the  plan  of  action  that 
was  crystallizing  in  his  mind  seemed  not  so  much  terrify 
ing  as  sheerly  absurd — the  stuff  of  a  nightmare  rather 
than  a  sober  reality.  The  shape  of  his  plan  derived  from 
something  he  had  said  to  Violet.  The  person  to  talk  to,  he 
had  told  her,  was  John,  himself.  He  would  take  a  dose 
of  his  own  medicine.  It  would  be  infinitely  harder,  of 
course,  to  defy  John  than  it  would  be  to  warn  Joe;  but 
easier  than  it  would  be  to  confess  to  John  after  he  had 
warned  Joe. 

In  a  moment  of  weakness  a  third  alternative  occurred  to 
him.  Suppose  instead  of  going  to  either  of  them,  he  were 
to  consult  Jennie?  She  had  been  on  the  ground  all  the 
while;  she  was  extraordinarily  astute;  she  might  already 
have  seen  through  the  plan,  assuming  there  was  a  plan, 
against  Joe's  fortunes,  and  warned  the  boss  to  be  on  his 
guard.  Even  if  she  had  not,  a  word  or  two — the  most  im 
palpable  sort  of  hint — would  be  enough,  because  it  wasn't 
as  if  Henry  really  knew  anything. 

It  was  with  a  burst  of  honest  anger  that  he  cast  this  pu 
sillanimous  project  out  of  his  mind.  It  was  no  good  think 
ing  about  it  any  longer.  There  was  one,  and  just  one, 
decent  thing  for  him  to  do — and  this  was  to  go  to  John. 


380         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

He  didn't  know  just  what  he  would  say — or  how  he  would 
begin.  That  would  have  to  be  left  to  the  moment. 

As  it  turned  out,  no  amount  of  preparation  or  rehears 
ing  would  have  done  Henry  any  good,  for  John  took  all 
the  wind  out  of  his  sails  in  the  first  two  minutes.  There 
was  no  waiting  in  the  outer  office  this  time.  The  moment 
his  name  went  in,  Rollie  Mill  came  out,  and  with  the  cere 
monious  gravity  of  a  good  undertaker,  took  him  straight 
back  into  the  innermost  of  John's  offices. 

"I'm  glad  you  turned  up  to-day,"  John  said.  "I  was 
afraid  Violet  might  have  persuaded  you  to  wait  and  come 
on  with  her — and  I  wanted  a  talk  with  you  as  soon  as  I 
could  get  it.  Greer's  put  one  over  onus,  Henry.  A  smooth 
first-class  job,  right  under  our  noses.  He'll  go  into  Sat 
urday's  meeting  with  an  absolute  voting  control  of  the 
stock." 

"I  hope,"  Henry  said  blankly  (and  quite  sincerely  too. 
He  was  completely  disorientated  by  this  kaleidoscopic 
change  in  the  situation) — "I  hope  it  isn't  due  to  something 
that  I  have  overlooked." 

"Lord,  no,"  John  assured  him.  "It  isn't  your  fault. 
You  voted  with  us  on  it.  No ;  we  sawed  ourselves  off  with 
the  limb,  while  he  stood  by  and  told  us  he  wished  we 
wouldn't.  Greer's  got  the  stock  we  issued  to  that  fake 
inventor." 

He  went  on,  after  an  interval  of  purely  emotional  com 
ment  on  the  situation,  to  tell  Henry  how  they  had  put  out 
a  feeler  or  two  to  determine  whether  this  stock  was  in  the 
market.  It  was  only  a  natural  thing  to  do.  If  anybody 
was  going  to  get  those  shares,  they  preferred  it  to  be 
themselves.  Something  about  the  way  in  which  their  ad 
vances  were  received  had  led  them  to  suspect  that  there 
was  something  beneath  the  surface;  so  Gregory  Corbett 
had  managed  to  get  in  personal  touch  with  the  inventor, 
the  pretext  being  that  Gregory  wished  to  discuss  some 
of  the  technical  points  about  the  process  with  him.  "Well, 
according  to  Greg,  the  man  didn't  understand  the  process, 
himself.  A  rather  shrewd  sort  of  hick,  he  was !  no  educa- 


ROMANCE  381 

tion  at  all,  and  really  a  little  nutty  about  cornstalks.  He 
hadn't  the  least  glimmer  of  an  understanding  of  bacteri 
ology.  That  made  it  plain,  of  course,  that,  he,  himself, 
never  could  have  invented  the  process  he  had  patented,  and 
they  had  paid  him  for.  They  looked  him  up  pretty  care 
fully  through  their  local  banking  connections ;  found  he  had 
never  had  any  money  at  all  until  along  last  August,  when 
he  cashed  a  Chicago  draft  for  ten  thousand  dollars.  Plain 
enough  where  he  got  it,  of  course. 

"We  had  him  up  here  and  went  after  him  hammer  and 
tongs  to  buy  that  stock.  He  claimed  right  up  to  the  last 
minute  that  he  had  the  stock,  and  that  he  was  the  inventor 
of  the  process  we  had  infringed;  but  we  made  him  an 
offer  at  last  that  brought  the  sweat  right  out  on  him. 
Then  he  caved  in  and  admitted  that  the  shares  weren't 
his  any  more.  He  couldn't  get  them  for  us,  he  said,  if 
we  offered  him  all  the  money  in  Chicago.  So  we  know 
where  they  are,  all  right.  They  are  locked  up  in  Joe 
Greer's  strong  box. 

"But  what  we  don't  know  is  what  he  is  going  to  do 
Saturday  at  the  meeting.  I  wrote  him  a  letter  day  before 
yesterday  to  feel  him  out.  Said  we  would  be  very  glad  to 
reelect  the  whole  directorate,  and  asked  him  if  that  would 
be  satisfactory  to  him.  I  got  an  answer  from  him  this 
morning,  saying  it  would;  but  of  course  we  don't  know 
whether  he'll  play  fair  or  not. 

"We've  got  to  pretend  we  think  so.  The  only  protection 
we've  got  for  the  present  is  that  he  doesn't  know  that  we 
know  he's  got  that  stock — at  least  I  don't  believe  he 
knows.  That  dummy  inventor  of  his  will  be  afraid  to 
tell  him.  As  long  as  Greer  thinks  we  are  unsuspicious,  he 
may  let  things  ride  for  a  while.  You'll  treat  him  as  if 
nothing  had  happened,  of  course.  Keep  your  eyes  open, 
and  tell  me  if  he  lets  anything  slip.  Have  you  seen  him 
since  you  got  home?" 

"No,"  Henry  said  blankly.  "I  thought  I  would  come 
straight  to  you,  first." 

"Glad  you  did,"  said  John,  getting  up  by  way  of  end- 


382         JOSEPH  GREEE  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

ing  the  audience.  "But  you  had  better  go  over  and  hook 
up  with  him  as  soon  as  you  can.  We  are  depending  on 
you  from  now  on,  you  know."  This  was  genially,  almost 
humorously,  said,  but  it  rattled  Henry  worse  than  ever. 

"I  don't  think  you  ought  to  rely  on  me,"  he  began 
miserably. 

But  John,  with  a  laugh  and  a  thump  on  the  back,  cut 
him  short.  "Don't  you  worry  about  it,"  he  said.  "Did 
you  have  a  good  trip  ?  How 's  Violet  looking  ?  She  wired 
me  from  New  York  that  she  was  feeling  a  whole  lot 
better.  She's  coming  home  Friday,  I  believe." 

Evidently  she  did,  for  she  telephoned  Henry  Friday 
night,  apparently  for  the  mere  cousinly  purpose  of  saying 
"Hello,"  and  asking  how  it  seemed  to  be  back  in  Chicago. 
He  suspected  she  would  have  liked  some  report  from  him 
upon  the  mission  he  was  supposed  to  have  undertaken  for 
her;  but  she  didn't  ask  for  anything  of  the  sort,  nor  too 
obviously  wait  for  it;  She  finished  their  little  talk  by  tell 
ing  him  she  meant  to  fulfill  to-morrow  a  promise  she  had 
made  Margaret  to  look  over  his  flat  and  see  what  condition 
it  was  in,  after  having  stood  housekeeperless  so  long.  If 
she  came  around  to-morrow,  some  time  after  lunch,  would 
anybody  be  there  to  let  her  in? 

Henry  promised  that  in  case  the  maid  was  out,  as  she 
would  be  likely  to  be  on  Saturday  afternoon,  he  would 
see  that  a  key  was  left  with  the  people  in  the  apartment 
below.  It  struck  him  as  a  little  unlike  his  sister  to  have 
asked  Violet  to  go  poking  about  the  flat  in  search  of 
domestic  horrors  incident  to  a  long  period  of  bachelor  oc 
cupancy,  but  he  gave  it  no  more  than  a  passing  thought. 
He  had  more  important  matters  on  his  mind. 

The  annual  meeting  was  to  be  to-morrow  afternoon,  and 
Henry  was  approaching  this  with  all  the  sensations  of  a 
schoolboy  going  into  a  hard  examination.  Where  would 
he  be,  he  wondered — what  sort  of  world  would  he  find 
confronting  him  to-morrow  night?  If  Joe  had  any  mine 
of  his  own  to  spring,  he  had  certainly  given  Henry  no  in 
timation  of  it. 


ROMANCE  383 


The  meeting  went  off  with  an  appearance  of  unanimity 
and  good  will  which  Henry  found  almost  farcical  in  the 
light  of  the  bitter  antagonisms  he  knew  were  bristling 
about  *the  board.  Prosperity  of  course  is  a  wonderful  un 
guent,  and  Joe's  report  was  so  eloquent  of  the  prospect  of 
it  that  the  development  of  any  friction  upon  the  sur 
face  of  things  would  have  been  impossible.  Nothing  short 
of  a  volcanic  eruption  could  have  broken  through — and 
this  didn't  happen. 

Joe  was  able  to  report  the  organization  of  forty-two 
subsidiary  companies,  since  their  original  four  mills  had 
got  into  productive  operation.  The  normal  capactiy  of 
each  of  these  subsidiary  units  was  four  thousand  tons  of 
straw,  which  meant  that  nearly  ten  per  cent,  of  the  en~ 
tire  straw  crop  of  the  flax-growing  country  would  be 
processed  next  year  under  their  patents. 

The  standard  organization  of  these  subsidiaries  was 
based  upon  a  local  cash  subscription  of  fifty  thousand  dol 
lars,  twenty  thousand  of  which  was  to  be  paid  to  the 
parent  company  for  a  complete  equipment  of  machinery. 
Since  Corbett  &  Company  was  selling  this  machinery  to 
the  Greer  Company  for  fifteen  thousand  dollars  a  set, 
the  Greer  Company  showed  a  profit  here  of  over  two 
hundred  thousand  dollars. 

Each  of  the  subsidiary  companies  paid  for  its  license 
under  the  patent  by  the  issuance  to  the  Greer  Company  of 
fifty  thousand  dollars  of  seven  per  cent,  preferred  stock, 
this  being  one-half  of  its  preferred  capitalization.  The 
common  stock  in  the  subsidiaries  was  all  held  by  the  local 
subscribers  to  the  remainder  of  the  preferred,  it  being 
issued  to  them  share  for  share.  The  Greer  Company 
would  thus  receive  in  lieu  of  royalty  from  each  of  its  sub 
sidiaries,  thirty-five  hundred  dollars  a  year  in  dividends 
on  its  preferred  stock,  which  figured  a  total  revenue  to 
the  parent  company  of  one  hundred  forty-seven  thousand 
dollars  annually. 

The  bulk  of  the  profits  to  be  expected,  however,  would 


384       JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

derive  from  the  contract  into  which  the  Greer  Company 
had  entered  with  the  subsidiaries.  The  Greer  Company 
agreed  to  buy  the  entire  output  of  all  the  subsidiary 
companies  at  a  price  figured  upon  the  sum  of  an  average 
cost  of  the  straw  plus  the  cost  of  processing  as  shown  by 
the  four  mills  in  operation,  and  a  twenty  per  cent,  manu 
facturer's  profit.  The  Greer  Company  agreed  further  to 
pay  half  of  its  profits  in  merchandising  this  material,  pro 
rated  according  to  tonnage,  to  the  subsidiary  companies. 
It  wasn't  possible,  of  course,  to  compute  this  profit  in  ad 
vance,  but  with  market  conditions  as  they  were  to-day,  it 
would  be  very  large,  indeed. 

It  had  required,  Joe  concluded,  no  skill  or  effort  at  per 
suasion  to  induce  these  groups  of  local  capitalists  to  or 
ganize.  Entlmsiasm  there  was  at  a  high  pitch,  and  he 
believed  it  to  be  fully  warranted.  It  was  his  confident 
expectation  that  the  subsidiaries,  out  of  their  share  of  the 
profits  on  one  year's  crop,  would  get  back  the  full  amount 
of  their  investment.  Most  of  them,  he  thought,  would 
have  sufficient  working  capital  left,  after  building  their 
warehouses  and  paying  for  the  machinery,  to  finance 
themselves  comfortably;  but  in  any  case,  an  ample  line  of 
credit  would  be  available  in  the  local  banks.  The  im 
portant  thing  in  the  immediate  future  was  to  make  sure 
that  the  plants  were  properly  built,  their  equipments 
correctly  installed,  and  the  whole  job  completed  in  time 
to  be  ready  for  this  summer's  harvest.  With  this  in  mind, 
he  expected  to  spend  most  of  his  time  during  this  spring 
and  summer  in  the  Northwest,  supervising  the  work  and 
speeding  it  up. 

' '  If  we  can  get  those  mills  equipped,  I  believe  we  '11  have 
the  job  done.  We  know  the  process  by  experience  now,  as 
well  as  in  theory.  We  know  the  stuff  is  good.  We  know 
the  linen  industry  has  been  starving  for  years  for  raw 
material,  and  we  believe  we  are  going  to  have  thirty-two 
million  pounds  of  it  to  offer  before  a  year  from  now. 
That's  how  we  stand,  and  I  think  we're  to  be  congratu 
lated.  " 


ROMANCE  385 

Joe  possessed  somehow  the  latchkey  to  Henry's  imagi 
nation.  Whenever  he  talked  consecutively  about  any 
thing,  he  transported  Henry  to  the  actual  ground,  made 
him  see  the  thing  Joe  was  talking  about — and  feel,  too, 
with  a  sharper,  clearer  ring  of  emotion.  There  was  con 
veyed  to  him  now  an  exciting  sense  of  the  momentum  of 
this  thing  Joe  had  been  doing.  A  year  ago  when  they  had 
been  talking  possibilities  and  percentages,  millions  of  dol 
lars  and  thousands  of  tons,  it  had  seemed  too  unreal  for 
Henry's  imagination  to  kindle  at  it;  and  their  actual  be 
ginnings  had  seemed  trivial — ludicrous  compared  to  the 
vein  they  had  been  talking  in.  Personally,  Joe  had  fas 
cinated  him,  but  the  present  occupation  of  his  days  had 
never  seemed  to  Henry  quite  worthy  of  him. 

The  presentation  now  of  that  multitude  of  activities  ar 
ticulated  into  a  single  accomplishment  had  an  effect  upon 
Henry  that  fell  not  far  short  of  awe.  It  was  like  seeing 
a  great  sail  hoisted  and  burgeoning  to  the  wind.  He  had 
been  shocked  a  day  or  two  ago  when  John  had  told  him  of 
the  trick  Joe  had  resorted  to  for  getting  control  of  the 
company,  as  well  as  hurt  on  his  own  account  that  his 
friend  should  have  deceived  him.  Now  the  matter  seemed 
negligible.  Joe  was  entitled  to  the  control  of  the  com 
pany.  His  creative  energy  was  the  only  vital  principle 
in  it.  It  was  ludicrous,  really,  that  the  unimaginative  in 
telligence  of  the  financiers  should  have  attempted  to  bar 
his  path  to  it.  Attempting  to  overreach  him,  they  had 
found  themselves  overreached.  Gently,  humorously 
rather,  he  had  outwitted  them  all.  Henry  could  remember 
now  with  a  smile,  his  own  distress  over  having  to  vote 
against  Joe  in  that  memorable  matter  of  the  stock  pay 
ment  for  the  patents. 

What  if,  he  wondered  fantastically,  the  others  around 
the  table  were  suddenly  to  see  the  thing  in  the  same  light  ? 
What  if  John  were  to  say,  "Look  here,  Joe,  we  know 
you've  got  control  of  the  company,  but  that's  all  right. 
We  ought  to  have  given  it  to  you  from  the  first.  We  are 
satisfied  to  let  you  run  the  thing.  All  we  want  is  the 


386         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

fun  of  watching  you  do  it."  How  natural  an  outbreak 
like  that  would  be — and  how  monstrously  impossible  it 
was! 

There  was  no  more  expression  in  any  of  their  faces  than 
if  they  had  been  playing  bridge;  but  underneath  their 
smooth  urbane  surface,  Henry  was  aware  of  an  uneasy 
alertness.  What  was  he  trying  to  do,  here,  and  what  did  he 
mean  by  this  ?  And  for  a  climax,  would  he  after  all  break 
his  word,  and  elect  his  own  board  of  directors  at  the  end 
of  the  meeting?  He  didn't,  of  course — Henry  could  have 
told  them  hours  ago  that  he  would  not. 

The  formal  routine  of  winding  up  the  business  of  the 
meeting  was  clicked  off  under  Jennie's  practised  hand  as 
rapidly  as  possible.  As  soon  as  the  adjournment  was 
taken,  John  with  Gregory  and  Frank  Crawford  went 
away.  There  was  no  disposition  on  their  part  to  linger 
for  an  informal  discussion  of  affairs,  or  for  the  bottle  of 
ancient  Scotch  which  Joe  offered  to  produce.  They 
would  be  having  a  confab  of  their  own,  Henry  supposed, 
and  was  glad  they  hadn't  invited  him  to  take  part  in  it. 
There  was  momentarily  a  thoughtful  look  in  Joe's  eye  as 
he  watched  their  broad  top-coated  backs  receding  down  the 
corridor. 

He  produced  his  bottle.  Jennie,  though  invited,  de 
clined  to  join  them  over  it.  She  wanted  to  get  her  minutes 
in  shape,  she  said.  Henry  exclaimed  in  frank  astonish 
ment  at  the  enormous  size  of  the  drink  Joe  poured  for 
himself — an  ordinary  tumbler  it  was,  and  he  had  filled  it 
more  than  two-thirds  full.  And  he  surprised  Henry  again 
by  betraying  a  flash  of  embarrassment  over  Henry's  call 
ing  attention  to  it.  He  drank  down  the  whisky,  though, 
like  so  much  water.  He  was  not  in  a  talkative  mood, 
Henry  observed.  Not  melancholy  either,  but  a  little  pre 
occupied.  He  got  up  as  soon  as  Henry  had  done  sipping 
his  drink,  saying,  "If  you're  going  home,  I'll  drive  you 
up." 


ROMANCE  387 

6 

Henry  hadn't  meant  particularly  to  go  home  just  then. 
It  was  only  about  four  o'clock  in  the  afternoon,  and 
momentarily  he  hesitated.  Before  he  could  speak,  Joe 
added,  "I'll  tell  you  what.  We'll  take  the  bottle  along 
with  us  up  to  your  place,  and  sit  down  with  it  as  long  as 
you  like.  I  want  to  get  out  of  here,  that's  all." 

Henry  was  tickled  by  this  humorous  attribution  to  him 
of  a  reluctance  to  desert  a  bottle  of  Scotch,  and  pleased 
besides  with  Joe's  offer  to  pay  him  a  visit,  so  he  was 
puzzled  by  a  moment  of  reluctance  which  he  unmistakably 
felt.  Something  or  other,  his  conscience  it  seemed  to  be, 
was  trying  to  tell  him  he  ought  not  take  Joe  home  with 
him  to-day.  They  were  half-way  there  in  Joe's  car  and 
he  was  in  the  act  of  saying  apologetically  that  the  place 
looked  like  the  devil  with  Margaret  so  long  away,  when 
the  train  of  association  completed  itself.  Violet!  She 
had  spoken  of  coming  to  his  flat  this  afternoon. 

He  spent  a  desperate  minute  or  two  in  the  vain  search 
for  a  pretext  for  taking  Joe  somewhere  else.  He  con 
templated  telling  him  in  so  many  words  that  Violet  might 
be  there  and  that  he'd  better  not  come  in,  but  this  didn't 
seem  a  possible  thing  to  do,  if  for  no  other  reason  than  that 
it  involved  an  admission  that  he  knew  more  of  the  affair 
than  he  was  supposed  to  know.  Anyhow,  Violet  had 
spoken  of  running  in  for  a  few  minutes  after  lunch,  and 
it  was  now  well  after  four.  Assuming  that  she'd  carried 
out  her  intention  at  all,  which  was  not  any  too  likely, 
she'd  almost  certainly  have  gone  by  now.  He'd  have  to 
chance  it. 

Oddly  enough,  after  the  first  horrified  moment  when  he 
saw  the  two  coming  face  to  face,  he  was  enormously  re 
lieved  that  it  had  happened.  Joe  happened  to  be  stand 
ing  where  Violet  couldn't  see  him  as  she  came  down  the 
corridor  to  the  sitting-room,  and  she  called  gaily  to  Henry 
that  she  had  him  in  her  power  now.  She  could  black 
mail  him  with  Margaret  to  any  tune  she  liked,  after  this 
look  about  the  flat. 


388         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

She  flushed  like  a  schoolgirl  at  the  sight  of  Joe,  threw 
him  a  rather  cavalier  nod  of  greeting,  and  then,  seeming 
to  change  her  mind  about  it,  went  deliberately  up  to  him 
and  held  out  her  hand. 

' '  I  wonder  if  you  ever  got  a  message  from  me, ' '  she  said 
composedly  enough  but  without  trying  to  make  the  words 
sound  completely  casual.  "I  left  one  with  your  butler, 
one  day  last  winter  when  you  were  hurt.  I  hope  you're 
quite  all  right  again.  I've  known,  the  last  two  or  three 
months,  how  miserable  it  is  to  be  ilL" 

Joe  remarked,  without  answering  her  question,  that 
he'd  heard  she  hadn't  been  well  but  that,  apparently,  her 
trip  had  done  her  good. 

"I  don't  know  whether  it  was  going  away  or  coming 
back  that  did  it,"  she  said,  so  lightly  and  swiftly  that 
Henry  was  not  quite  sure  whether  he'd  heard  her  aright 
or  not.  She  went  straight  on,  with  a  good  deal  more  em 
phasis,  to  mention  tea.  She  thought  she  could  manage  to 
produce  some  if  they'd  like  it. 

"I'll  make  tea  in  a  minute,  if  you  would  like  some," 
Henry  said.  ' '  Joe  insists  that  it 's  too  stimulating  for  him, 
and  won't  drink  it — but  he  brought  along  a  bottle  of 
Scotch." 

This  drew,  amazingly,  a  black  look  from  Joe.  It  was 
gone  in  an  instant,  and  he  said  with  a  laugh  that  that 
bottle  of  Scotch  had  been  brought  along  for  Henry,  and 
no  one  else.  For  himself,  he  would  like  a  cup  of  tea  as 
well  as  anything  he  could  think  of. 

Another  odd  thing  happened  then.  Violet  offered  to 
go  and  make  it,  naturally  enough,  since  she  had  been  the 
one  who  had  suggested  having  it;  and  Henry,  equally  of 
course,  insisted  on  doing  it  himself.  This  was  his  house, 
and  tea-making  was  his  specialty.  Even  Margaret  had 
been  known  to  admit  that  he  understood  it  better  than  she 
did.  He  was  in  the  midst  of  this  and  on  his  way  to  the 
door  when  the  sudden  misgiving  assailed  him  that  Violet 
might  not  want  to  be  left  alone  with  Joe,  and  that  her  in 
sistence  on  making  the  tea  had  been  sincere.  He  stopped, 


ROMANCE  389 

tried,  without  succeeding,  to  pick  up  Violet's  eye,  took 
another  hesitating  step  toward  the  door,  and  finally 
wavered  into  saying,  ' '  Of  course  if  you  would  rather  make 
it,  Violet  ..." 

She  whipped  around,  and  in  so  doing  turned  her  back 
squarely  on  Joe,  her  face  ablaze  with  an  uncontrollable  ex 
asperation.  Her  voice  had  a  perceptible  edge  on  it,  too, 
though  luckily  it  was  not  as  expressive  as  her  face,  as  she 
said,  "I've  no  passion  for  making  tea,  Henry,  nor  even 
for  drinking  it  if  it's  any  bother." 

Henry  said  it  wasn't,  of  course,  and  slunk  away  pre 
cipitately  to  the  kitchen.  He  couldn't  wonder  that  his 
clumsiness  had  annoyed  her.  Floundering  about  like  that, 
he  had  heavily  underscored  whatever  difficulty  there  might 
have  been  in  the  situation  for  either.  But  a  mere  passing 
flash  of  irritation  would  not  have  produced  as  deep  a 
detonation  as  that.  He  had  been  the  target  for  them  often 
enough  to  know.  This  was  like  the  snapping  of  a  wire 
that  had  been  drawing  tighter  and  tighter  for  a  long  time. 
It  was  as  if  she  had  endured  his  presence  there  in  the 
room  to  the  last  possible  moment,  and  had  then  been  con 
fronted  by  the  possibility  that  he  would  not  leave  it  at  all. 

Oh,  he  was  exaggerating,  of  course,  the  way  he  always 
did — making  mountains  out  of  molehills.  Naturally,  she 
had  been  anxious  to  get  rid  of  him.  Here  was  an  un 
foreseen  chance  to  clear  up  a  misconception  which  had 
been  distressing  her  for  months;  and  she  had  seen  herself 
in  danger  of  being  balked  of  it  by  her  cousin's  sheer  in 
excusable  stupidity.  He  felt  horribly  foolish  out  there, 
somehow,  puttering  around  in  the  kitchen,  not  knowing 
whether  to  hurry  or  to  delay  his  tea-making  operation. 
He  did  both  by  turns. 

But  the  really  appalling  idea  that  this  might  be,  on  the 
part  of  both  Joe  and  Violet,  a  deliberate  rendezvous,  did 
not  break  over  him  until  he  was  just  on  the  point  of  bear 
ing  down  upon  them  again  with  his  tray.  He  set  the  tray 
down  again  upon  the  kitchen  table — he  was  lucky  not  to 
have  dropped  it — and  sat  down  himself  on  a  kitchen  chair. 


390         JOSEPH  QUEER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

It  was  a  crazy  notion,  of  course,  utterly  unwarranted, 
outrageous — and  yet  there  was  a  fatal  sort  of  plausibility 
about  it.  Violet's  telephoning  and  arranging  to  get  the 
key,  and  Joe's  impatience  the  moment  the  meeting  was 
over  to  come  home  with  him.  Violet  had  always  been  a 
flirt,  but  she  had  never,  he  thought,  done  anything  that 
went  as  far  as  this.  He  wished,  forlornly,  that  he  never 
thought  of  things  like  that;  and  he  went  on  from  there  to 
wish  with  passionate  intensity  that  when  he  did  think  of 
them,  he  could  make  up  his  mind  what  to  do  about  it. 

He  experienced  a  temporary  relief  in  finding  the  pair 
composedly  talking  commonplaces,  when  he  came  in  with 
the  tray,  and  for  the  twenty  minutes  or  so  before  Violet 
went  away,  the  conversation  ran  easily  enough  upon  no 
more  serious  topic  than  his  own  sudden  emergence  upon 
Violet's  horizon,  after  all  these  years,  as  a  brilliantly  suc 
cessful  bridge  player  and  gambler  upon  steamer  pools. 

She  took  her  leave  of  Joe  informally,  without  another 
handshake,  upon  the  vaguely  expressed  hope  that  he  would 
come  to  see  them  some  time.  ' '  Though  if  you  're  going  to 
be  up  north  all  summer,  I  don't  suppose  you  will." 

To  Henry,  she  said  when  he  had  followed  her  into  the 
vestibule,  "I  haven't  made  up  my  mind  yet  what  sort  of 
blackmail  I'm  going  to  levy  on  you  for  not  telling  Mar 
garet  what  this  place  looks  like — but  when  I  decide  what  I 
want,  I'll  let  you  know." 

Could  she  possibly,  mean,  Henry  wondered;  that  she 
didn't  want  Margaret  told  about  this  meeting  with  Joe? 
And  hadn't  the  indifference  of  her  parting  with  Joe  been 
really  a  little  overdone?  Henry  had  something  new  to 
worry  about,,  There  wasn't  any  doubt  of  that. 

7 

For  Joe,  that  handful  of  minutes  with  Violet,  while 
Henry  was  out  in  the  kitchen  making  tea,  contained  one 
of  the  most  astonishing  and  revolutionary  experiences  of 
his  life. 

He  had  gone  to  the  rendezvous  not  all  all  sure  whom  he 


ROMANCE  391 

would  find  there,  nor  what  the  purpose  of  it  was.  Clear 
curiosity  was  all  that  had  led  him  to  keep  it.  A  note  in 
a  plain  sealed  envelope  had  been  handed  him  by  Anson  the 
night  before,  delivered,  the  man  said  by  an  A.  D.  T. 
messenger.  "If  you  care  to  go  home  with  Henry  Craven 
after  the  meeting  to-morrow  ..."  That  was  all  it  said, 
and  there  was  no  signature.  He  wasn't  familiar  with 
Violet's  handwriting,  and  he  did  not  at  once  think  of  her 
as  a  possible  author  of  it. 

He  was  at  first  disposed  to  regard  Henry  as  the  person 
primarily  concerned.  His  manner  had  struck  Joe  as  not 
quite  natural  since  his  return;  and  Jennie,  to  whom  he'd 
mentioned  this,  confirmed  his  impression  even  more  em 
phatically.  "He's  not  a  bit  like  himself,  with  me,"  she 
said.  Had  he  got  himself  into  a  scrape  of  some  sort,  Joe 
wondered.  You  never  could  tell.  But  the  reference  to 
the  meeting  limited  the  zone  of  conjecture  very  materially. 
Barring  Jennie  and  the  girls  in  the  office,  there  weren't 
many  women  who  knew  they  were  to  hold  a  meeting  to 
morrow  afternoon. 

Once  he'd  thought  of  Violet — a  wild  enough  cast  of  the 
imagination,  certainly — the  phraseology  of  the  note  pointed 
to  her  almost  conclusively.  He  could  not  even  conjecture, 
though,  what  could  have  driven  her  to  an  act  like  this, 
Panic,  one  would  suppose,  but  what  could  she  think  she 
had  to  be  afraid  of  after  this  lapse  of  months?  And  he'd 
done  nothing  to  cause  a  sudden  recrudescence  of  her  hatred 
of  him.  Of  course,  he'd  go  and  see.  He  went  braced,  he 
supposed,  for  anything. 

His  first  look  at  her  mystified  him,  the  sudden  bright 
flush  and  the  emotion  which  spoke  from  her  wide  open 
eyes;  partly  fright,  it  was,  but  not  all.  And  of  the  anger 
he  'd  expected,  not  a  trace ! 

What  she  said  was  surprising  enough;  not  that  she'd 
sent  him  a  message  when  he  was  hurt,  but  that  she'd  left 
it,  which  meant,  if  words  meant  anything,  that  she  had 
come  in  person  to  see  him.  The  fact  was  new  to  him  now, 
but  this  did  not  impeach  the  truth  of  it.  He  had  told 


392         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

An  son  on  one  of  those  black  days,  that  he  didn't  want  to 
be  told  the  names  of  his  visitors.  He  recognized  that  it 
was  an  amazing  thing  for  her  to  have  done,  but  the  as 
tonishment  he  felt  now  was  not  over  the  visit  nor  even 
over  her  admitting  that  she  had  paid  it,  but  over  the 
manner  in  which  the  admission  was  made.  It  was  a  for 
mal  treaty  of  peace,  an  announcement  of  her  new  line, 
presented  with  reference  to  their  public,  Henry. 

But  that  something  very  different  underlay  this  public 
manner,  Joe  saw — and  believed  she  meant  him  to  see. 
Why  the  devil  couldn't  Henry  see  it  and  take  himself  off? 
(He  had  got  Joe  on  a  raw  nerve  with  that  remark,  his 
second  that  day,  about  the  bottle  of  Scotch.  Joe  was  de 
veloping  an  angry  distaste  these  days  for  jocular  refer 
ences  to  his  fondness  for  whisky  or  the  amount  of  it  he 
consumed.  He  was  beginning  to  do  his  serious  drinking 
in  solitude.)  He  held  his  breath  over  the  way  she  flared 
up  and  swept  her  cousin  out  of  the  room,  and  he  did  not 
move,  nor  did  she,  until  they  heard  the  flop  of  the  swing 
door  into  the  kitchen. 

Then  she  turned  and  faced  him,  and  he  moved  a  step 
toward  her — and  stopped.  Something  the  same  look  was 
in  her  face  that  he  had  seen  just  after  he  had  kissed  her, 
the  look  that  had  made  him  think  of  Beatrice;  not  a 
woman's  look  at  all — a  child's.  It  was  troubled  now,  and 
desperately  resolute.  Her  pose  was  not  a  woman 's,  either ; 
it  was — a  schoolgirl's.  He  saw  her  lips  were  trembling 
and  felt  a  lump  come  into  his  throat. 

"I  must  say  it  quickly,"  she  began,  and  then  for  a 
matter  of  seconds  stood  silent.  "It  was  true,  what  you 
said  in  the  car  that  day.  It  was  all  true.  That's  why 
it  made  me  so  angry.  I  didn't  know  it  till  you  said  it. 
That's — that's  one  of  the  things  I  had  to  tell  you.  I 
didn  't  think  I  'd  ever  do  it  but  I  haven 't  been  sleeping  very 
well.  And  none  of  the  things  I  tried,  to  get  it  out  of 
my  head,  were  any  good  ...  So  I  thought  if  I  told  you 
.  .  .  You  see  why,  don't  you?  I  mean,  you  understand 
it  isn't  .  ." 


ROMANCE  393 

"Yes,  I  understand,"  he  told  her  hastily.  This  was 
quite  untrue.  In  the  revulsion  of  feeling  that  had  swept 
over  him,  he  was  bewildered.  The  thing  to  do,  he  ad 
monished  himself,  was  to  remember  every  word  she  said 
so  that  he  could  think  out  her  incredible  meaning  after 
ward.  They  wouldn't  have  much  more  time,  now. 
Henry  might  be  coming  back  any  minute.  "I  wish  you'd 
sit  down,"  he  said,  and  after  she  had  obeyed  him,  in  a 
sort  of  entranced  docility,  he  added,  "If  there's  anything 
you  want  me  to  do  .  .  .  " 

"There  isn't,"  she  interrupted  with  a  gasp;  "not  a 
thing.  It's  just  ..."  She  broke  off  there  and  clasped 
her  hands  tight  in  her  lap,  between  her  knees.  "There's 
something  else  I  want  you  to  know.  I've  never  told  John 
what  really  happened  that  day.  But  I  didn't  tell  him — 
what  you  must  have  thought  I  did.  I  said  it  wasn't  any 
thing.  I  gave  him  my  word  it  wasn  't.  I  just  wanted  him 
to  let  me  alone  and  not  ask  questions.  But  of  course  he 
thought  ..." 

"Yes,  of  course,"  Joe  assented  at  random.  "That's 
all  right." 

"He  was  horribly  angry,"  she  persisted.  "I  don't 
know  whether  he  is  yet,  or  not.  He  doesn't  act  that  way 
any  more,  but  perhaps  that's  just  because  he  doesn't  want 
me  to — worry  about  it." 

"Well,  that's  all  right."  A  gleam  of  a  smile  broke 
through  on  the  words.  "You  don't  need  to  worry  about 
me,  anyhow.  I'll  look  out  for  myself.  I  have  been,  all 
along  for  that  matter." 

She  nodded.  "I  couldn't  bear  to  have  you  think,  if 
anything  did  happen,  that  I  was  the  one  who — started  it. 
I  knew  what  you'd  think  of  me.  When  you'd  really  been 
the  one  who — saved  me.  I  didn't  suppose  men  did  chival 
rous  things  like  that.  That's  what  it  was.  Because  it 
wouldn't  have — meant  anything — much,  to  you." 

"It's  all  right,"  he  repeated.  The  poor  phrase  seemed 
to  be  all  he  could  lay  his  tongue  to.  After  a  moment's 
struggle,  not  with  embarrassment  but  with  the  mere  stiff- 


394         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

ness  of  his  mind,  lie  added,  ' '  There 's  nothing  more  for  you 
to  worry  about.  You  can  forget  all  about  it." 

She  smiled  in  rueful  dissent  to  that,  and  he  met  it  with 
a  smile  of  his  own.  At  last  he  had  something  to  say. 
' '  That  was  a  surprising  word  you  used — chivalry.  I  don 't 
believe  it  was  ever  hooked  on  to  me  before.  I've  never 
been  what  you  could  call  a  Galahad  ..." 

"I  know,"  she  broke  in.  There  was  a  spark  of  ani 
mation  in  her  tone,  now.  She  was  no  longer  frozen.  "I 
heard  all  about  that  before  I  ever  knew  you.  I  always 
thought  you  must  be  one  of  the — horridest  people,  that 
way,  I  had  ever  known.  I  suppose  that 's  why — partly  why 
— it  got  me  when  you  acted  the  way  you  did  in  the 
car." 

''I  can't  see,"  Joe  said,  "that  there  was  anything  much 
to  that.  It  was  a  string  we  couldn't  play  out  and  I  said 
so.  Maybe  if  I  hadn't  had  a  good  deal  of — experience,  I 
wouldn't  have  seen  that  we  couldn't  play  it  out." 

When  she  spoke  again,  at  the  end  of  a  short  silence,  her 
manner  had  stiffened,  so  that  once  more  it  was  as  if  she 
were  trying  to  recite  something.  "I  suppose  I  must  have 
been  one  of  the  most  ignorant  people  in  the  world.  I 
didn't  think  I  could  tell  you  this.  I  don't  believe  it's  a 
thing  you'll  be  able  to  believe.  But  it's  true,  and  it's  the 
only  real  excuse  I  have.  I  thought  I  knew  a  lot,  as  much  as 
most  people,  but  I  didn  't.  I  knew — nothing  at  all.  It  was 
all  new — that  day.  As  if  I'd  never  been  married — or  any 
thing.  You  can't  believe  that, — can  you?" 

"I  knew  it  then,"  he  said,  not  looking  at  her  as  he 
spoke.  "That  was  what  pulled  me  up,  gave  me  time  to 
think. ' '  He  added  a  moment  later,  ' '  It  wasn  't  what  we 
wanted, — either  of  us." 

He  had  a  strange  sensation  that  this  last  remark  of  his 
went  falling,  falling,  for  a  long  time,  like  a  dislodged  rock, 
down  a  bottomless  canyon,  bounding  from  wall  to  wall, 
sending  up  fainter  and  more  distant  echoes,  until  at  last 
an  abysmal  silence  swallowed  it. 

After  a  while  she  said,  "You  wanted  to  be  friends  with 


ROMANCE  395 

me  then.  I  suppose  it's  too  late  for  that  to  be  any  good 
to  you,  now."  There  was  no  color  of  sentimental  peni 
tence  in  her  tone,  but  she  seemed  to  feel  the  need  of  clear 
ing  her  meaning  of  this  possible  interpretation,  and  added, 
"I  mean,  now  that  your  daughter  has  married  and  gone 
away. ' ' 

"It's  too  late  in  a  way,"  he  said  thoughtfully,  ignoring 
her  reference  to  Beatrice.  "I  had  a  fool  idea  for  a  while 
last  summer,  of  settling  down,  maybe  buying  a  place  up  at 
Lake  Forest,  turning  into  one  of  the  stall-fed  crowd  my 
self,  when  some  of  the  pile,  we're  going  to  make  out  of 
this  linen  process  came  in.  I've  got  over  that." 

"I'm  glad  you  have.  You  aren't  like  us. — Of  course," 
she  added,  "we  aren't  all  like  ourselves.  Not  all  the  time. 
But  you  still  want  to  be  rich?  What  will  you  do  with  it, 
if  you  don 't  settle  down  ? ' ' 

"No  trouble  about  that!"  he  told  her,  with  a  laugh. 
"The  more  I  have,  the  bigger  a  life  I  can  swing.  But 
I've  got  to  hatch  some  chickens  before  I  can  begin  count 
ing  'em.  They're  already  counted,  for  that  matter. 
Forty-two  little  flax  mills,  spotted  all  over  the  Northwest. 
I've  got  to  see  to  it  that  they're  all  built  and  equipped 
right  and  ready  for  business  between  now  and  August. 
Good  fun,  that'll  be — getting  out  of  a  white-collar  job  for 
a  while." 

It  was  then  that  Henry  Craven  came  in  with  the  tea. 

8 

As  the  weeks  went  by,  this  experience  of  Joe  Greer's- 
loomed  higher  and  more  mysterious,  like  a  receding  moun 
tain.  He  found  no  difficulty  in  remembering  every  word 
Violet  had  said  to  him  that  day.  There  was  hardly  a 
sentence  of  it  that  he  did  not  pick  up  again  and  again  to 
scrutinize  and  reinterpret  and  ponder  over.  It  became  a 
sort  of  Bible  for  him,  that  little  interview. 

Prima  facie,  it  was  plain  enough.  She  was  in  love  with 
him.  It  had  been  no  passion  for  cold  justice  that  had 
driven  her  to  the  admission  of  the  truth  of  what  he  had 


396         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

said  to  her  in  the  car  the  day  of  the  cloud-burst — and  she 
didn't  for  a  moment  pretend  that  it  was. 

Neither  had  she  tried  to  lead  him  to  believe  that  th£ 
"new"  thing  she  had  surrendered  to  that  day  had  been 
a  mere  passing  gust  of  desire.  He  remembered  how  that 
sentence  of  his,  "It  wasn't  what  we  wanted,  either  of  us," 
had  gone  plunging  and  echoing  down  into  an  abyss  of 
silence.  She  had  not  by  a  word,  not  even  by  an  acquies 
cent  movement  of  the  head,  availed  herself  of  the  shelter 
he  had  held  out  to  her.  It  was  what  she  wanted,  he  was 
at  liberty  to  think — as  much  to-day  as  it  had  been  last 
summer. 

Her  anger  had  been  merely  the  first  instinctive  weapon 
of  unrequited  love.  When  it  had  failed  to  bring  him  to 
her,  she  had  come  to  him.  There  was  nothing  in  that  to 
have  mystified  a  man  of  Joe's  compendious  experience. 

There  is,  though,  a  fundamental  distinction  to  be  made 
between  Joe  and  the  type  of  man  with  whom  he  is  easily 
confounded.  The  clue  lies  in  a  thing  he  once  said  to 
Jennie  MacArthur — and,  indeed,  repeated  in  substance  to 
his  daughter  Beatrice.  He  had  said  to  Jennie,  in  speaking 
of  Annabel  as  an  exception  to  this  rule,  "I  had  never  had 
anything  to  do  with  a  woman  before — and  I  never  have 
since  for  that  matter — who  wasn't  in  love  with  me — 
crazy  about  me,  for  the  time  being  anyhow."  And  to 
Trix,  "The  only  woman  who  ever  kissed  me  without  want 
ing  to  was  your  mother.'* 

It  is  probable  that  both  these  statements  of  Joe's  were 
literally  true.  He  was  sensitive,  and  he  was  not  vain. 
And  thanks  to  these  two  qualities,  though  many  of  his 
love-affairs  had  been  temporary  and  tawdry  enough  they 
had  always  been  to  some  extent  redeemed  by  a  genuine 
mutuality.  His  insistence  upon  this  had  not  been  a  moral 
attitude,  but  an  instinctive  necessity — and  it  had  saved 
him  from  the  emotional  bankruptcy  which  is  the  fate  of 
the  average  libertine.  He  never  could  greet  the  passion 
of  any  woman,  even  the  corset  model  or  the  chorus-girl, 
with  the  fatuous  dead  grin  of  the  gratified  conqueror. 


ROMANCE  397 

Whatever  sort  of  woman  Violet  might  have  been,  her  rev 
elation  of  herself  to  Joe  could  not  have  been  wholly  a  be 
trayal. 

She  was,  however,  in  his  experience,  a  woman  of  an  al 
together  exceptional  sort.  Her  breeding,  her  fineness 
of  texture,  the  hard  jeweled  quality  of  her,  had  instantly 
attracted  him.  He  had,  unwarrantably  to  be  sure,  taken 
for  granted  that  she  possessed  a  certain  tough  honesty  of 
mind  which  he  did  not  often  attribute  to  women,  and  had 
never  before  attributed  to  a  woman  who  was  sexually  at 
tractive  to  him.  It  was  here  that  his  disillusionment  upon 
the  day  of  their  quarrel  had  been  sharpest.  She  had  re 
fused  to  face  the  facts  of  their  situation.  "Aren't  you 
any  realer  than  that  ? "  he  had  exclaimed,  outraged  by  her 
unexpected  cowardice. 

Well,  she  had  made  amends  for  that  panic-stricken  de 
feat  on  the  day  of  their  rendezvous  at  Henry  Craven's — 
ample,  astonishing  amends.  She  had  stood  before  him, 
trembling  to  the  lips,  to  acknowledge  the  true  nature  of 
the  gift  she  had  offered  him,  and  he  had  refused.  She 
attributed  his  refusal  to  chivalry,  and  wished  him  to 
know  that  she  had  not,  voluntarily  at  least,  betrayed  him 
to  her  husband.  Here  was  a  courage  in  fact-facing  that 
took  Joe's  breath.  It  thrilled  him  every  time  he  thought 
about  it. 

He  spent  hours  thinking  about  her,  and  his  memories 
and  reflections  vested  her  with  the  attributes  of  romance. 
One  thing  she  had  told  him  went  to  his  head  like  wine. 
She  had  been  sitting  with  her  clasped  hands  pressed  be 
tween  her  knees,  and  her  voice  had  been  dry  with  the 
desperate  effort  she  was  making  to  tell  him  all  the  truth. 
"It's  the  only  excuse  I  have,"  she  said.  "I  thought  I 
knew  a  lot,  but  really  I  didn't  know  anything.  It  was  all 
new,  that  day." 

This  was  the  amazing  paradox.  She  was  a  woman  of 
the  world,  beautiful,  clever,  experienced,  sophisticated — 
and  it  had  remained  for  him,  for  Joe  Greer,  to  awaken 
her.  She  didn't  suppose,  she'd  said,  that  he  would  be 


398         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

able  to  believe  that.  But  lie  had  never  doubted  it.  The 
truth  declared  itself  in  the  very  pose  of  her  body,  the 
schoolgirl  pose  in  which  she  had  desperately  faced  him, 
that  had  brought  a  lump  into  his  throat. 

His  own  emotions  struck  him  as  queer.  She  had  never 
looked  more  desirable  than  when  she  had  thus  stood  be 
fore  him  making  her  unreserved  confession,  yet  he  had 
not  felt  even  the  beginning  of  an  impulse  to  make  love  to 
her.  During  their  whole  interview,  he  hadn't  touched 
her,  not  even  during  the  silence  after  he  had  said  fatu 
ously  that  ''that"  wasn't  what  either  of  them  wanted,  a 
silence  which  amounted,  on  her  part,  to  a  denial  that  it 
was  true. 

Even  now,  when  he  realized  that  on  his  part  it  hadn't 
been  true,  either,  he  couldn't  imagine  himself  pulling  her 
up  in  the  sudden  embrace  which  her  candor  would  have 
warranted.  On  instinct  he'd  played  his  part  better.  She 
had  come  to  him  to  make  her  confession,  still  trusting  to 
the  "chivalry"  that  she  had  attributed  to  him  on  the 
earlier  occasion.  And  she  had  been  safe  in  trusting  him. 
The  quality  she  had  discovered  in  him  was  there! 

She  meant,  he  thought,  to  go  on  trusting  to  it.  She 
hadn't  invited  him,  even  in  the  most  impalpable  way,  to 
ask  for — opportunities.  Apparently  it  contented  her  that 
he  should  know  the  truth.  Her  honesty  had,  he  perceived, 
lifted  the  affair  to  a  higher  level  altogether.  He  couldn  't 
even  contemplate  furtive  meetings  with  her,  illicit  gratifi 
cations.  She  had  become  for  him  a  finer  person  than 
that.  He  felt  a  profound  pity  for  her.  What  a  life  she 
had  led,  wTith  that  flaming  spirit  of  hers,  among  the  stall- 
fed  cattle!  "We  aren't  like  ourselves,"  she  had  said; 
"not  all  of  us;  not  all  the  time."  And  John  Williamson, 
married  to  her  for  twenty  years,  father  of  a  child  by  her, 
had  never  been  able  to  teach  her  what  love  was ! 

There  dawned  upon  Joe  a  romantic  dream.  He'd  had 
many  a  romantic  dream  before,  but  never  with  a  single 
exception  about  a  woman — and  that  exception  had  been 
his  daughter.  His  new  dream  was  about  Violet.  Some 


ROMANCE  399 

day,  when  the  harvest  of  his  great  idea  about  flax  straw 
had  been  stowed  away  and  a  new  field  awaited  him,  Violet 
would  come  to  him,  to  be  taught  what  love  was.  And 
marriage.  True  marriage — not  the  unreal  imposture 
she'd  taken  on  trust  and  lived  half  smothered  in  since 
girlhood.  It  would  be  as  new  for  him  as  for  her.  As  un 
like  the  sensual  substitutes  he  had  contented  himself  with 
as  it  would  be  unlike  the  pitiful  farce  of  his  legal  mar 
riage  with  Annabel. 

(That,  thank  heaven,  was  ended  at  last.  He  had  re 
ceived  a  copy  of  the  final  California  decree  while  Henry 
was  in  France  with  his  sister  and  Violet.) 

What  a  mess  of  cross-purposes  life  was!  An  ox  like 
John  Williamson  would  have  been  just  the  man  for  Anna 
bel.  And  she  would  never  have  given  him  a  moment's 
disquiet.  Violet  must  have  given  him  a  good  many.  And 
some  day  .  .  .  Poor  Williamson!  He'd  take  it  hard,  of 
course,  a  blow  like  that  to  his  pride.  But  in  the  mean 
time  he  might  rest  in  peace.  Violet  wouldn't  be  flirting 
with  an  operatic  barytone  this  summer.  The  man  she 
loved  would  be  up  in  the  North,  getting  ready  for  the 
flax — which  was  going  to  increase  John's  fortune  as  well 
as  make  his  own.  He  didn't  begrudge  that  to  Williamson. 
He'd  take  no  advantage  of  him,  either  with  Violet  or  in 
the  business. 

He  saw  her  again  before  he  went  north.  The  meeting 
came  about  in  a  way  that  was  commonplace  enough,  and 
in  its  commonplaceness  rather  surprising  to  Joe.  She 
asked  him  to  dinner.  The  invitation  was  telephoned  by 
her  secretary.  "Could  Mr.  Greer  dine  with  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Williamson  Thursday  evening  at  eight?"  Joe  said  he 
could,  and  went — not  knowing  what  of  a  wide  range  of 
possibilities  to  expect.  It  was  not  a  strictly  society  din 
ner — these  usually  ran  to  bridge  afterward — but  a  more 
heterogeneous  affair,  with  a  marked  leaning  toward  the 
musical  wing  of  Bohemia.  The  Hugh  Corbetts  were  old 
guard,  of  course,  but  they  rather  conspicuously  misrepre 
sented  their  type;  and  the  other  guests  were  the  com- 


400         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

poser,  Anthony  March,  and  his  wife,  who  had  been  Mary 
Wollaston,  the  Novellis  and  Mrs.  Novelli's  sister.  Rose 
Aldrich,  who  was  available  as  an  odd  woman  for  Joe, 
since  her  husband  was  in  "Washington  arguing  a  case  be 
fore  the  supreme  court. 

If  Violet  had  tried  to  illustrate  the  truth  of  her  as 
sertion  to  Joe  that  the  stall-fed  were  not  like  themselves 
all  the  time,  she  could  not  have  done  it  better.  It  was  a 
good  party,  and  but  for  his  preoccupation  with  Violet, 
Joe  might  have  enjoyed  it  hugely.  Two  of  the  other  four 
men  had  minds  as  vivacious  and  trenchant  as  his  own. 
And  of  the  five  women,  four  were  real  personalities,  and 
four  again  were  notably  beautiful.  But  Violet  held  him 
all  the  evening  in  a  state  of  wyonder. 

Most  of  the  time  her  manner  was  simply  iinreconcilable 
with  the  woman  who  had  come  to  Henry  Craven's  apart 
ment  to  see  him.  She  treated  him  comfortably — like  an 
old  friend;  called  him,  openly,  "Joe,"  even  in  her  hus 
band's  presence.  How  she  could  have  explained  this  volte- 
face  to  John,  he  could  not  imagine,  but  she  must  have 
done  it  somehow,  for  there  wasn  't  a  trace  of  self-conscious 
ness  about  either  of  them.  They  certainly  knew  how  to 
keep  their  faces,  that  bunch. 

She  didn't  seat  him  by  her  at  dinner,  and  later  in  the 
evening  when  the  men  came  in  from  the  dining-room,  he 
found  her  intrenched  in  conversation  with  Rose,  with 
whom  he  had  pretty  well  talked  himself  out,  upon  the  sub 
ject  of  the  stage,  at  dinner.  So  after  drifting  over  in 
her  direction  without  dislodging  Rose,  he  drifted  rather 
sulkily  away  again,  and  sat  down  by  himself.  However, 
when  Novelli,  by  vociferous  request,  went  to  the  piano  and 
began  to  play,  Violet  came  quietly  and  sat  down  beside 
him. 

She  did  not  talk  to  him,  even  then.  Apparently  there 
were  enough  real  musicians  in  the  party  to  shame  the 
others  into  silence.  The  Brahms  Rhapsody,  which  Novelli 
was  playing  with  an  erotic  Italian  fire  that  it  would  have 
amazed  the  old  Hamburger  to  discover  he  had  put  into  it, 


ROMANCE  401 

might  have  stirred  Joe  profoundly  had  he  been  able  to 
feel  that  Violet,  too,  was  responding  to  it.  But  he  knew, 
somehow,  she  wasn't.  She  was  simply  waiting  quietly  for 
the  music  to  end;  and  the  knowledge  irritated  him,  not 
with  Violet,  but  with  the  music.  It  did  end  at  last — and 
then  there  came  a  change. 

Headed  by  Novelli  and  seconded  by  Hugh  Corbett,  they 
gathered  round  March,  demanding  that  he  perform  ' '  some 
thing  of  his  own."  He  protested  with  apparent  serious 
ness  that  they  ought  to  ask  him  to  sing  instead,  as  he  did 
that  much  better  than  he  played  the  piano,  his  wife  listen 
ing  to  this  absurdity  in  contented  amusement. 

Under  cover  of  the  diversion,  Violet,  without  turning  to 
look  at  Joe,  nor  relinquishing  the  smile  that  was  bent 
upon  the  other  group,  asked,  "Are  you  going  Sunday?" 
The  low  tone  was  charged  with  emotion  that  made  him 
catch  his  breath,  and  before  he  could  answer,  she  added, 
' '  For  all  summer  ? ' ' 

"I'll  come  down  once  or  twice,  I  guess,"  he  said. 

A  sudden  sense  of  the  portentous  thing  there  was  be 
tween  them  broke  over  him  in  a  great  surge  and  all  but 
stifled  him.  Evidently  it  was  stifling  her,  too.  She  man 
aged  a  banality  or  two  about  what  the  weather  would  be 
like  up  there.  She'd  never  been  in  that  country.  John 
went  somewhere  into  those  parts  for  ducks,  but  not  of 
course  at  this  time  of  year.  Would  there  be  anything  for 
him  to  do  in  the  way  of  amusements,  golf  or  riding? 

His  answers  were  mere  monosyllables.  Presently  she 
said,  peremptorily  and  very  low,  "You'll  have  to  stop 
looking  at  me  like  that.  I  can't  stand  it." 

He  knew  he'd  been  devouring  her,  and  he  told  her 
humbly  he  was  sorry.  "I'm  trying  to  play  the  game," 
he  added,  "but  I'm  not  very  good  at  it." 

Either  his  apology  or  her  own  outburst  relieved  her,  for 
she  turned  to  him,  as  he  turned  away  from  her,  and  the 
tension  sensibly  slackened.  "I'm  glad  you  aren't,"  she 
said  swiftly — and  after  a  brief  pause  went  on.  "I  can 
see  you  up  there,  when  you've  got  out  of  a  white  collar. 


402         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

It'll  be  a  blue  flannel  shirt,  I  suppose,  very  much  unbut 
toned,  and  khaki  riding  breeches,  and  you'll  be  swearing 
horribly  at  a  lot  of  laborers  because  they  aren't  building 
things  fast  enough  to  suit  you." 

He  laughed  at  this  motion-picture  misconception  of  his 
summer's  activities.  The  sort  of  people  he'd  be  having 
confabs  with,  he  told  her,  would  be  the  leading  local  hard 
ware  merchants  in  this  town  or  that,  the  banker,  a  retired 
farmer  or  two,  contractors  and  builders.  There  wouldn't 
be  any  sitting  around  on  horseback.  They'd  meet  in  hotel 
parlors  and  real-estate  offices,  and  he  wouldn  't  dare  swear 
whole-heartedly  at  all  for  fear  they'd  be  shocked.  The 
•worst  of  it  would  be  the  evenings,  after  ten  o'clock  when 
everybody  but  himself  had  gone  to  bed. 

"Will  you  write  me  a  letter  now  and  then,  on  some 
of  those  evenings?"  she  asked.  "I  don't  mean  ...  I 
mean  just  an  ordinary  letter,  that  will  tell  me  where  yon 
are  and  what  you've  been  doing  that  day,  and  what  the 
hotel's  like?  So  I  can  see  you  there — that's  all  I  mean." 

She  left  him  without  having  given  him  time  to  answer, 
alert,  apparently,  to  respond  to  some  call  which  had  been 
imperceptible  to  him,  and  did  not  speak  to  him  again  that 
evening,  except  for  the  "Good-by!  Good  luck!"  which 
she  nodded  brightly  at  him  when  he,  along  with  the  other 
guests,  was  going.  He  had  thought  for  a  moment  that 
she  didn't  mean  even  to  shake  hands  with  him,  but  some 
one  who  had  been  standing  in  the  way  drew  aside  and 
with  a  little  laugh,  like  the  acknowledgment  of  an  after 
thought,  she  did. 

God,  what  an  actress  she  was !  She  was  the  same  woman 
who  had  stood  before  him  saying,  desperately,  "It  was  all 
true,"  and,  "It  was  new  that  day." 

He  did  not  write  to  her  from  the  North.  His  thoughts 
of  her  when  at  the  end  of  a  day's  toil  he  was  left  alone 
at  last  in  an  hotel  bedroom  were  not  such  as  he  could 
entrust  to  paper.  They  were  made  poignant,  too,  and 
sometimes  half  frantic  by  doubt  of  her.  Which  of  the 


ROMANCE  403 

two  women  he  knew  her  for  would  she  be  as  she  tore  open 
the  flap  of  a  cheap  envelope  from  some  small  Montana 
hotel?  It  wasn't  worth  risking.  Silence  would  be  better. 

He  came  home  for  a  few  days  early  in  July — a  minor 
failure  in  the  arrival  of  the  machinery  was  his  excuse — 
on  a  Saturday  morning  during  the  first  onslaught  of  a 
period  of  ferociously  hot  weather,  and  after  having  debated 
with  himself  at  length  on  the  train  whether  to  let  her  know 
he  was  in  town  or  to  trust  to  the  information  reaching  her 
through  her  husband  or  Henry,  he  telephoned  to  her  Lake 
Forest  house  from  the  station  the  moment  he  left  the 
train. 

She  asked  him  out  directly  for  over  the  week-end,  and 
laughed  at  his  hesitation  about  accepting.  "It's  John 
you've  come  to  see,  isn't  it — and  Greg?  Well,  they'll 
be  here."  Then  she  asked  him  whether  he  had  ever  played 
bridge  with  either  of  them.  He  told  her  he  had  not,  where 
upon  she  warned  him  that  he  didn't  play  at  all,  ever. 
With  a  laugh,  as  he  caught  on,  he  assented.  "I  never 
touch  a  card  of  any  sort,"  he  assured  her.  "I've  sworn 
off." 

Thanks  to  this  maneuver,  they  managed  to  be  together 
a  good  deal  during  the  next  two  days,  for  play  during  that 
house  party  was  almost  incessant,  and  Violet  was  able  to 
pose  as  the  conscientious  hostess  looking  after  the  odd 
guest  who  did  not  join  in.  Her  place  at  the  tables  was 
taken  by  Dorothy,  who  played  with  all  the  obsessed  serious 
ness  of  the  neophyte. 

It  was  not,  however,  a  satisfactory  visit  for  Joe. 
Violet's  tactics  worried  him.  They  were  no  longer  au 
dacious.  She  never  openly  carried  him  off  as  she  had 
done  at  the  traps  that  Sunday  morning,  the  first  time  she 
had  ever  seen  him.  She  never  sought,  nor  for  long  al 
lowed,  any  secure  solitude  for  them.  Yet  in  the  fringes  of 
the  crowd  or  at  table  with  no  more  privacy  than  derived 
from  the  fact  that  both  their  neighbors  were  turned  away 
from  them,  she  would  talk  to  him  in  a  way  that  brought 
his  heart  into  his  throat.  He  had  always  supposed  he  had 


404         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

a  talent  for  keeping  his  face,  but  these  talks  with  her  kept 
him  in  perpetual  terror  of  a  betrayal. 

He  hated,  too,  being  under  John  Williamson's  roof. 
The  husband's  incredible  complacency  irritated  him.  He 
seemed  impervious  to  the  warnings  of  jealousy.  It  wasn't 
possible  to  assume  that  he  had  ceased  to  care  for  her.  His 
steady-going,  considerate  affection  for  her  was  obvious. 
What  sort  of  terms  were  they  on,  anyhow?  How  had  she 
explained,  and  he  accepted,  her  change  of  attitude  toward 
himself  1 

Violet  was  not  informative  on  these  points,  even  when 
he  resorted  at  last  to  direct  questions.  She  earnestly  pro 
tested  herself  fond  of  John  immensely.  He  was  an  ab 
solute  dear  in  a  lot  of  ways.  In  some  ways  that  Joe 
wouldn't  understand,  nor  believe.  "You  would  never 
understand  him,"  she  asserted,  "any  more  than  he  would 
you. ' ' 

"Well,  I  wish  he  weren't  so  damned  unsuspicious,"  Joe 
said.  "He'd  make  this  a  lot  easier  for  me  if  he  tried  to 
make  it  harder." 

She  looked  at  him  thoughtfully.  "You  know,"  she 
said,  "in  a  business  wav,  it's  you  I  worry  about;  not 
him." 

"Well,  you  needn't,"  he  told  her  shortly.  "He  might 
have  got  me  if  I  hadn't  played  a  hunch  earlier  in  the 
game.  But  I  did.  I've  got  my  share  in  the  Greer  Com 
pany  nailed  down,  where  he  can  never  get  it  away  from 
me." 

"In  the  long  run,"  she  persisted,  "he'll  get  the  bet 
ter  of  you.  I  believe  he's  already  sure  of  it.  That's  just 
a — hunch,  as  you  say.  He  doesn  't  talk  to  me  about  it  any 
more. ' ' 

He  took  this  soberly,  apparently  to  her  surprise.  Evi 
dently  she  had  expected  him  to  laugh  at  her;  and  when 
he  didn't,  she  told  him  contritely  that  she  hadn't  more  than 
half  meant  it. 

He  made  no  reply  to  that,  and  after  watching  him  in 
tently  for  a  moment,  she  asked  in  sudden  concern,  "Joe, 


ROMANCE  405 

has  anything  begun  to  go  wrong,  now? — Anything  you 
can  see,  here  or  up  north?" 

"No,  I  guess  not,"  he  said  absently.     "Why?" 

"You  seem  different,  somehow,"  she  said.  "Oh,  I  know 
it's  hot,  and  you've  been  working  horribly  hard,  but  you 
always  seemed  like  a  person  who  couldn't  be  tired.  And 
now  .  .  .  You  don't  look  quite  natural  either." 

"I'm  not  sleeping  much,"  he  confessed.  "Haven't 
since  I  got  that  crack  on  the  head  last  winter." 

(Indeed,  the  amount  of  whisky  it  now  took  to  insure 
him  even  the  beginning  of  a  night's  sleep  was  so  great  as 
to  have  begun  whispering  an  impatiently  unheeded  warn 
ing.) 

"Of  course,"  he  added,  on  a  new  note,  "this  thing  of 
ours  doesn't  make  it  any  easier." 

They  were  really  alone  for  once.  It  was  Sunday  night. 
A  big  purple  storm-cloud,  driving  up  from  the  southwest 
had,  with  a  flash  or  two  of  lightning  and  a  sudden  patter 
of  rain-drops,  driven  the  rest  within  doors.  He  and  Violet 
had  lingered  outside  to  show  the  good  faith  of  their  com 
bined  prediction  that  the  thing  would  blow  around,  as  it 
now  showed  signs  of  meaning  to  do. 

"I'm  not  trying  to  make  you  sorry  for  me,"  he  went 
on,  "but  it  is  wearing  you  down,  too.  I  guess  it's  harder 
for  you  than  for  me. — Violet,"  his  voice  dealt  with  the 
word  roughly,  "what  do  you  do?  How  do  you  manage?" 

* '  My  life,  you  mean  ? ' '  she  asked.    ' c  I  play  bridge  .  .  .  ! " 

"I  mean  about  your  husband,"  he  interrupted. 

"We're  perfectly  good  friends,"  she  told  him,  after  a 
silence,  "but  that's  all.  There's  nothing  new  about  that. 
It's  been  that  way,  practically,  for  a  long  time." 

"You  said  that  day  at  Henry's  that  it  wouldn't  have 
meant  much  to  me — what  I  hadn't  done  the  other  time. 
It  would  have,  but  I  didn't  know  it — then.  This  is  as 
new  a  thing  to  me  as  it  is  to  you.  It's  changed  every 
thing.  That  means  it's  got  to  come  out  somewhere. 
You've  trusted  me,  and  you  can  go  on  trusting  me,  but 
we  can't  stop  here — and  we  aren't  going  into  the  ditch." 


406         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

' '  I  don 't  know  where  we  are  going, ' '  she  said  hopelessly. 
"There's  no  place  we  can  go." 

The  words  ended  in  a  sob,  and  in  an  instant  she  was  in 
his  arms.  He  kissed  her,  too — not  as  he  had  done  on  the 
earlier  occasion,  but  gently,  reverently  almost. 

"I'll  wait,"  he  said.  "I  think  you're  the  gamest  thing 
in  the  world;  and  when  the  time  comes,  and  you're  ready, 
you  '11  do  the  thing  that 's  there  in  front  of  you  to  do.  1 11 
wait  till  then." 

She  rose  then,  and  they  walked  slowly  toward  the 
house.  But  before  they  got  within  the  luminous  zone  from 
the  lighted  windows,  she  stopped,  and  kissed  him  fugitively 
once  more.  She  uttered  a  little  laugh  as  they  moved  on 
again. 

"We're  acting  like  a  pair  of  children,"  she  said. 

It  is  true  one  would  hardly  have  expected  just  this 
white  flame  of  romance  from  these  ingredients. 

Joe  went  back  to  Chicago  early  the  next  morning,  and 
left  for  the  North  before  the  end  of  the  week.  He  didn't 
see  Violet  again  until  October. 

9 

Henry  Craven  went  up  to  the  Williamsons'  for  the 
week-end  over  the  first  of  August.  His  sister  was  al 
ready  there.  She  was  practically  spending  the  summer 
with  Violet.  Henry  came  looking  forward  to  a  good  time. 
His  troubles  were  in  abeyance.  The  Greer  Company  was 
thriving  like  the  scriptural  bay  tree.  Thanks  to  its  profits 
on  the  sale  of  machinery,  its  bank  balance  was  imposing. 
Since  the  meeting  in  April  there  had  not  been  a  breath  of 
trouble  between  John  and  Joe.  Apparently  John  was 
reconciled  to  Joe's  voting  control  of  the  company  as  long 
as  Joe  didn't  attempt  to  exercise  it  unf airly;  and  Henry 
could  see  no  reason  wThy  Joe,  with  his  program  adopted  and 
his  hands  left  free,  should  attempt  to  exercise  it  unfairly. 

Violet 's  emotional  stresses  seemed  to  have  subsided,  too, 
since  she  had  had  that  talk  with  Joe.  It  had  ceased  to 
seem  important  to  Henry  whether  the  meeting  between 
them  had  been  accidental  or  contrived. 


ROMANCE  407 

Even  Henry's  modest  personal  affairs  were  prospering. 
The  directors  had  raised  his  salary  at  the  April  meeting 
to  twelve  thousand  a  year.  Margaret  had  made  enough  in 
commissions  upon  her  highly  successful  purchases  for 
Portia  Novell!  in  Italy,  that  spring,  to  pay  her  own  ex 
penses,  which  she  was  very  proudly  and  delightedly  doing. 
Henry  sometimes  wondered  whether  his  luck  had  not  really 
changed  in  some  mysterious  and  revolutionary  way  that 
day  at  Monte  Carlo. 

He  bolted  the  office  early,  got  out  to  Lake  Forest  in 
time  for  lunch,  had  the  good  fortune  to  find  young 
Dorothy  at  a  loose  end,  and  took  her  on  for  tennis.  Dodo 
played  a  very  stylish  game,  immensely  superior  in  the 
matter  of  form  to  the  late  Victorian,  back  court,  side  arm 
affair  that  Henry  stuck  to.  She  was  the  prettiest  thing 
in  the  courts  that  it  was  possible  to  imagine — with  her 
smashing  service  that  didn't  often  go  in,  and  her  lightning 
rushes  on  the  net.  But  Henry  had  a  mean  chop  stroke  and 
a  fairly  accurate  lob,  and  he  beat  her  two  sets  in  three — 
an  achievement  of  which  he  was  enormously  proud,  es 
pecially  as  Margaret  had  looked  on  admiringly  during  the 
last  set.  It  looked  an  exceedingly  jolly  world  to  him  about 
five  o  'clock  that  afternoon.  He  knew  he  would  be  horribly 
lame  to-morrow,  but  that  didn't  matter. 

He  found  the  evening,  though,  rather  dull.  It  seemed 
they  had  been  having  a  terrific  day  on  the  board  of  trade. 
December  wheat,  in  which  trading  had  begun  on  July 
fifteenth  at  around  two  seventy-five,  had  dropped  with  a 
crash  to  two  eleven  a  bushel,  and  this  portent  monopolized 
the  conversation  of  the  men  for  a  solid  hour  after  dinner. 
The  consensus  of  the  group  around  John's  table  was  that 
the  decline  flew  in  the  face  of  world-wide  and  invincible 
economic  conditions.  There  was  not  enough  wheat  to 
feed  the  world.  The  war  between  Russia  and  Poland  was 
raging  furiously;  Bolshevik  hosts  were  advancing  upon 
"Warsaw;  England  could  not  allow  the  Poles  to  be  over 
whelmed; — Lloyd  George  had  as  good  as  said  so.  Those 
December  contracts  in  wheat  were  likely  to  be  settled  at 
around  three  dollars. 


408       ^  JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Henry  yawned,  and  fancied  it  was  so.  Three  or  four 
of  these  guests  of  John's  were  men  whose  opinions  were 
regarded  by  readers  of  the  financial  pages  of  the  papers 
as  authoritative.  But  Henry  cared  nothing  about  wheat, 
and  he  cared  less  than  nothing  about  politics,  to  which  the 
conversation  presently  drifted.  Harding  or  Cox — League 
or  Association  of  Nations.  It  looked  like  Tweedle-dum  and 
Tweedle-dee  to  Henry. 

The  boredom  of  this  didn't  avail,  however,  to  overthrow 
his  mood  of  contentment.  He  drifted  out  on  the  terrace 
when  the  sitting  adjourned,  and  philosophically  watched 
the  young  ones  dancing  to  a  phonograph.  Dodo  nodded 
him  an  invitation  to  cut  in,  but  he  smiled  and  shook  his 
head,  indicating  by  a  gesture  his  feeling  of  advanced  de 
crepitude  since  his  bout  with  her  on  the  courts  that  after 
noon. 

It  was  amazing  how  the  kids  were  growing  up !  Young 
Ellen  "Whitney  there — she  couldn't  be  a  day  over  fifteen, 
and  was  going  to  be  a  beauty  like  her  mother — was  carry 
ing  on  with  Carter  Corbett  with  an  audacity  of  technique 
which  in  Henry's  day  a  girl  would  not  have  arrived  at 
short  of  twenty-four.  He  wandered  off  with  a  vague  idea 
of  finding  Violet.  But  when  he  happened  upon  her  in  a 
dark  corner  with  Ellen  "Whitney's  father,  he  strolled  on 
without  interrupting  them.  This  flirtation  was  tradi 
tional.  It  had  been  going  on  quite  harmlessly  for  a  dozen 
years.  It  occurred  to  him  rather  crudely,  as  he  walked 
away,  that  it  was  remarkable  also  how  the  old  stayed  young. 
There  was  nothing,  though,  he  felt  sure,  to  that  affair  of 
hers  with  Joe. 

John  caught  him  just  as  he  was  on  the  point  of  going 
to  bed,  and  made  a  date  with  him  for  to-morrow  morning 
in  the  gun-room.  There  was  a  little  matter  he  would  like 
to  take  up  with  Henry  before  he  went  back  to  town. 
Henry  was  feeling  so  cheerful  that  he  didn't  spend 
more  than  ten  minutes  before  he  went  to  sleep  worrying 
over  what  it  might  be  that  John  wanted  to  talk  to  him 
about. 


ROMANCE  409 

It  was,  however,  with  an  instantly  awakened  misgiving 
that  he  noted,  when  they  sat  down  together  in  the  gun 
room  after  breakfast,  John's  reluctance,  whatever  it  was 
he  wanted  to  talk  about,  to  come  to  the  point  of  it.  This 
was  portentously  unlike  him,  and  the  consequence  was  that 
the  friendlier  and  more  casual  he  seemed,  the  more  alarm 
ing,  to  Henry,  he  became. 

He  asked  how  things  were  going  at  the  office.  Oh,  he 
didn't  mean  business  details,  precisely — he  knew  all  about 
that — but  the  general  feel  of  it  all.  Did  Greer's  letters 
sound  as  enthusiastic  as  ever?  He  wasn't  finding  any 
trouble  up  there,  was  he?  John  knew  what  good  terms 
Henry  was  on  with  Miss  MacArthur.  Nothing  about  her 
— well,  her  manner,  to  indicate  anything  in  the  back 
ground,  he  supposed?  No,  he  wasn't  inquiring  about  any 
thing  in  particular.  Just  wanted  Henry's  general  re 
action  on  it.  It  looked  good  certainly.  There  was  no 
one  like  Greer  for  speeding  things  up.  Greg  Corbett  had 
always  said  that  about  him. 

Then,  for  a  while,  John  dropped  the  flax  business  al 
together,  and  talked  about  Margaret;  the  surprising  suc 
cess  she  had  made  buying  Italian  furniture  and  so  on 
for  Mrs.  Novelli.  That  was  quite  a  business  she  had.  Re 
markable  what  a  big  thing  she  had  made  of  it.  And 
right  now,  in  the  impoverished  state  of  Europe,  and  with 
exchange  what  it  was,  the  opportunity  was  bigger  than 
ever.  Margaret  really  knew  a  lot  about  that  sort  of  stuff, 
didn't  she?  Period  furniture  and  glass?  She'd  sure 
enjoyed  the  plunge  she'd  had;  excited  as  a  kid  about  it. 
It  might,  John  thought,  prove  a  real  field  for  her.  She'd 
marry,  some  time,  no  doubt,  but  meanwhile  she'd  be  hap 
pier  with  something  to  do  than  sitting  around  waiting  for 
Henry  to  get  rich  out  of  the  flax  business. 

"And  by  the  way,"  John  went  on.  He  hesitated  there 
for  a  moment  and  Henry 's  heart  dropped  a  beat  altogether. 
The  lightning  was  going  to  strike  now,  he  knew,  but  he 
hadn't  the  faintest  premonition  of  the  nature  of  the  bolt. 
"By  the  way,"  John  repeated,  "I  think  you  had  better 


410          JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

endorse  your  shares  in  the  Greer  Company,  and  bring  them 
around  to  me.  Then  if  I  decide  to  dispose  of  mine,  I  can 
sell  yours  too." 

''Sell  it?"  Henry  echoed,  astounded. 

"Oh,  it's  like  every  other  business,"  John  went  on 
evenly.  "Even  this  antique  business  of  Mrs.  Novelli's. 
It's  a  question  of  getting  in  and  getting  out  at  the  right 
time — and  usually  the  time  for  getting  out  is  damned 
short.  I'd  hate  to  have  to  go  ashore  and  leave  you  behind, 
so  it  strikes  me  I  had  better  have  the  shares — just  in 
case,  you  understand." 

"I  don't  see  .  .  ."  Henry  stammered.  "Everything 
has  been  going  better  than  we  hoped,  hasn't  it?  I  never 
really  believed  it  was  going  to  win  until  this  summer. 
Has  anything  happened — I  suppose  it  must  have — that 
I  don't  know  anything  about?" 

"Not  a  thing,"  John,  with  a  shade  of  impatience,  as 
sured  him.  "You  know  all  about  that  trick  Greer  played 
to  get  control.  Well,  whenever  I  find  myself  in  one  of 
these  industrials  that  I  don't  .control,  I  always  wear  a  life 
belt,  that 's  all.  And  I  think  you  had  better  put  yours  on, 
too.  It's  just  as  you  like,  of  course." 

"Of  course  I'll  bring  you  the  shares,"  Henry  said. 
"They're  really  yours,  anyhow.  I've  never  paid  for 
them."  But  he  knew  he  wrasn't  disguising  his  profound 
unhappiness  over  John's  suggestion. 

"Look  here,  Henry,"  John  said,  after  he  had  lighted  a 
fresh  cigar  and  offered  Henry  one;  "this  isn't  anything- 
to  get  worked  up  about.  We  don't  contemplate  doing 
anything  for  the  present.  It  may  be  weeks  or  months  even 
— or  we  may  never  sell  it  at  all.  But  the  farmers  and 
the  small  fry  are  still  feeling  rich.  Even  that  knockout 
in  the  wheat  pit  yesterday  won't  change  that.  And  be 
sides,  wheat  will  come  back,  for  a  while,  anyhow.  Up 
north,  they  believe  in  this  process  of  Greer 's,  just  as  much 
as  we  do ;  and  there 's  a  lot  of  capital  up  there  that  would 
pay  a  damn  good  price  for  stock  in  the  Greer  Company. 
As  far  as  the  control  is  concerned,  twenty-five  per  cent. 


ROMANCE  411 

of  the  stock  is  as  good  as  forty-five.  So  we  may  decide, 
to  some  extent,  to  cash  in. 

"These  boom  times  aren't  going  to  last  forever.  One 
of  the  biggest  motor-car  companies  in  the  country  is  in 
trouble  right  now.  Greer  isn't  the  sort  of  man  we  can 
trust  the  control  to — control  of  anything — let  alone  in 
mixed-up  times  like  these.  He's  one  of  these  fellows  that 
runs  away  with  an  idea ;  and  if  we  see  he 's  running  away 
with  this,  we  want  to  be  fixed  so  we  can  hop  off  the  wagon. 
That's  all." 

' '  I  see, ' '  Henry  said.  He  got  up,  literally  a  trifle  giddy, 
and  moved  toward  the  door.  ''All  right,"  he  added,  "I'll 
bring  the  shares  in  the  morning." 

"There's  one  important  thing,"  John  said,  the  words 
checking  Henry's  hand  upon  the'  latch.  "This  has  got 
to  be  kept  absolutely  quiet.  If  Greer  or  Miss  MacArthur 
should  catch  on  to  what's  in  the  wind,  there  would  be 
the  devil  to  pay.  Better  not  speak  of  it  to  anybody — not 
even  to  Margaret  or  Violet.".  Henry  nodded,  and  went 
out. 

On  his  way  to  bed  that  night  Margaret  fell  in  beside 
him  and  said  she  would  come  into  his  room  for  a  few 
minutes  for  a  talk.  He  meant  to  go  into  town  on  an  ea.rly 
train  next  morning,  and  she  didn't  expect  to  come  down 
to  breakfast.  She  helped  herself  to  one  of  his  cigarettes, 
hung  fire  for  a  minute  while  she  was  getting  herself 
started,  and  then,  rather  shyly — an  unusual  manner  for 
Margaret — asked  him  whether  John  had  been  talking  to 
him  that  day. 

Henry  admitted  lamely  that  he  and  John  had  talked 
about  various  matters — business  mostly. 

"Well,  did  he  talk  about  me!  That's  what  I  want  to 
know. ' ' 

' '  Oh,  yes !  Yes,  he  did.  He  said  quite  a  lot  about  you. ' ' 
But  he  couldn't,  as  it  happened,  remember  just  then  a 
word  of  what  John  had  said  about  Margaret,  and  he 
stopped  there,  vaguely  amiable,  but  quite  blank. 

Margaret  looked  at  him  curiously.     "What's  the  mat- 


412         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

ter  with  you,  Henry?  You've  been  looking  queer  all 
day.  Are  you  trying  to  act  like  a — half -wit?  What  I 
want  to  know  is  whether  John  told  you  what  he's  going 
to  do  for  me  ?  He 's  going  to  buy  in  with  Portia  for  me — 
buy  me  a  partnership.  Did  he  tell  you  that?" 

"Oh,  by  jove,  that's  great!"  Henry  cried.  He  was 
sure  this  was  the  way  he  would  feel  about  it  when  he  got 
his  ideas  sufficiently  straightened  out  to  feel  anything. 
"No,  he  didn't  tell  me.  I  can  see  now  though  that  he  was 
feeling  around  the  edges  of  it  to  see  how  it  would  strike 
me."  He  went  over  to  her  and  kissed  her — probably  to 
her  surprise,  he  was  aware.  Caresses  weren't  common 
between  them.  "That's  simply  great,  Peg,"  he  repeated. 
"I  wish  you  all  the  luck  in  the  world.  Sit  down  and  tell 
me  all  about  it."  He  was  relieved  to  see  that  this  burst 
of  enthusiasm  contented  her,  and  that  she  was  satisfied  to 
attribute  his  momentary  lapse  to  mere  brotherly  stupidity. 

She  did  tell  him  all  about  it  at  length.  How  it  was 
John's  own  idea.  How  he  had  gone  to  Portia  one  day  last 
week,  broached  the  matter  himself,  gone  into  details,  seen 
her  books — practically  done  the  whole  thing — before  tell 
ing  her  a  word  about  it.  She  had  talked  over  the  project 
with  Portia  herself,  but  only  as  a  sort  of  day-dream.  She 
had  never  thought  of  John  as  a  possible  means  of  realiz 
ing  it.  It  would  mean,  she  supposed,  going  to  Europe 
again  this  fall,  and  leaving  Henry  perhaps  for  months. 
But  this  wouldn't  matter.  He  had  got  on  perfectly  well 
without  her,  as  far  as  she  could  see,  during  her  previous 
absences.  It  was  simply  too  wonderful  to  be  true.  She 
was  going  to  succeed  at  it,  she  knew  she  was.  Henry 
couldn't  remember  seeing  her  glow  like  this  since  she  had 
been  a  girl,  and  wished  himself  rid  for  a  few  minutes  of 
the  weight  that  was  pressing  upon  his  diaphragm,  so  that 
lie  could  share  her  enthusiasm  properly.  Of  course  if  she 
thought  he  was,  it  was  all  right. 

She  said,  "I  don't  believe  you  can  realize  what  it'll 
mean,  Henry,  if  I  do  succeed.  Real  independence  of  you, 
and  everybody.  You've  been  awfully  good — and  I've 


ROMANCE  413 

been  rotten  to  you  about  half  the  time.  But  you  see  that 
was  because — well,  because  you  were  so  good;  because  you 
had  to  be.  You  were  doing  your  duty  by  me,  just  as  you 
always  did  it  by  mother.  And  whenever  I  got  to  thinking 
about  it,  it  drove  me  wild.  And  of  course  you  were  the 
only  person  I  could  take  my  wildness  out  on.  But  if  it 
comes  out  right — well,  I  guess  it  will  make  us  both  more 
human — to  each  other,  I  mean." 

Upon  this  tack,  in  his  present  state  of  confusion,  he 
couldn  't  meet  her  at  all,  and  after  a  hardly  articulate  pro 
test,  he  scrambled  back  to  the  safer  ground  of  details  and 
arrangements.  But  Margaret  couldn't  stay  on  the 
ground.  Her  emotions  wanted  an  outlet,  and  since  Henry 
wouldn't  be  the  target  for  them,  she  fell  to  talking  about 
John ;  how  inexhaustible  his  kindness  was ;  how  really  fine 
he  was;  how  superior  to  many  people  who  made  greater 
pretentious — he  never  made  any — to  the  qualities  of  the 
spirit.  And  at  last,  after  a  sigh,  "Poor  old  John!"  she 
said. 

She  hadn't  said  much  that  he  would  not,  in  a  normal 
mood,  subscribe  to,  but  to-night  his  mood  was  not  normal, 
and  her  enthusiasm  had  irked  him.  "Why  poor?"  he 
asked  captiously.  "He  doesn't  seem  very  poor  to  me." 

She  stared  at  him  and  shrugged  her  good-looking 
shoulders.  "You  can't  get  away  with  that,  Henry.  Not 
with  me.  You  know  well  enough.  You  know  more  about 
that,  by  a  good  deal,  than  I  do." 

He  knew,  instantly,  what  she  meant  and  he  was  aware, 
what  was  worse,  that  he  had  betrayed  the  fact  that  he 
knew.  This  was  always  the  devil  of  it,  with  him  and 
Margaret — the  way  they  were  running  upon  short  cir 
cuits.  He  said,  stiffly,  "I  suppose  you  mean  you're  feel 
ing  sorry  for  him  about  Violet,  but  you're  altogether 
wrong  if  you  think  I  know  any  reason  why  you  should." 

He  was  lucky  to  get  through  with  this  dignified  dis 
claimer  before  the  possibility  flashed  across  his  mind,  as  it 
did  a  moment  later,  that  Violet  might  have  told  Margaret 
something,  anyhow,  about  her  meeting  with  Joe  at  their 


414         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

flat,  for  lie  couldn't  restrain  a  gasp  at  the  thought  of  it. 
His  sister  had  turned  away  before  that  happened  and  was 
occupied  extinguishing  her  cigarette.  When  she  turned 
back  she  said,  with  heavily  underscored  stresses : 

"Well,  /  don't  know  anything  about  it.  Except  that 
she's  let  herself  go  silly  about  your  Mr.  Greer.  It  isn't  one 
of  her  flirtations;  she  always  crams  those  down  your 
throat.  This  thing  she's  trying  to  keep  dark.  She  spent 
hours  explaining  to  me  why  she  invited  him  out  for  that 
week-end  that  I  was  at  Lake  Geneva.  She'd  made  it  so 
horribly  difficult  for  John  by  getting  into  a  stupid  quarrel 
with  the  man,  and  John  had  been  so  decent  about  it,  that 
the  only  thing  she  could  do  had  been  to  make  it  up.  And 
the  amount  she's  talked  about  him  since — not  really  say 
ing  anything  about  him — just  lugging  him  in!  Henry, 
there  have  been  times  when  I've  felt  I'd  have  to  slap  her, 
just  for  being  such  a  fool!" 

She  said  this  with  an  intensity  that  made  Henry  blink, 
but  he  managed  a  good-humored  laugh  and  acknowledged 
that  Violet  was  pretty  transparent.  ' '  About  this,  though, ' ' 
he  unwisely  proceeded,  "I've  an  idea  she's  really  been 
plucky.  She  did  Joe  a  serious  injustice,  I  believe,  and 
she's  swallowed  her  pride  and  tried  to  make  amends. 
That's  just  as  I  see  it,  of  course." 

"Well,"  Margaret  summed  up  with  an  elaborate  simu 
lation  of  patience,  "I've  always  known  men  were  idiots 
about  her,  and  I  ought  to  be  used  to  it."  Then  this  man 
ner  deserted  her.  "I  wish  she  would  run  away  with 
him!"  she  said  furiously,  in  that  monotonous  voice  Henry 
dreaded.  "Give  John  a  chance  to  have  some  one  around 
who'd  treat  him  decently.  I  wish  she'd  go  so  far,  just 
once,  that  she  couldn't  come  back.  She's  always  trying 
how  near  she  can  go  to  the  edge.  And  she'd  be  nicely 
dished  if  he  happened  to  be  the  man  she  went  over  with. 
She  doesn't  want  him.  She'd  never  have  looked  at  him 
if  she  hadn't  got  the  idiotic  idea  that  I  wanted  him,  my 
self." 

He  stared  at  her  through  this,  horrified  and  helpless,  as 


ROMANCE  415 

always.  But  the  fear  he  got  from  her  look,  through  the 
short  silence  that  followed,  that  she'd  actually  scream  at 
him  in  another  minute,  enabled  him  to  wrench  his  gaze 
away.  The  silence  spun  out  a  little  longer  and  then  he 
heard  her  give  a  short  satiric  laugh.  "Oh,  Henry,  you're 
such  a  fool!"  she  said.  "You  know  I  don't  mean  any 
thing! — Good  night,"  she  added,  from  the  door,  and  left 
him. 

10 

He  had,  of  course  a  diabolically  bad  night,  sleepless  save 
for  troubled  snatches  of  slumber  during  which  he  dreamed 
of  Joe  eloping  with  Violet,  and  himself  hopelessly  mixed 
up  in  it  in  one  role  after  another  and  always  in  danger  of 
getting  shot  by  somebody.  In  his  waking  hours  this  lurid 
suggestion  of  Margaret's  disturbed  him  very  little. 

The  thing  he  had  on  his  mind  was  the  sale  of  Greer  & 
Company  stock  by  John  and  his  allies,  and  what  this  por 
tended  to  Joe.  His  damned  conscience  was  sniping  at  him 
again  upon  the  old  question  of  loyalty.  Should  he  turn 
over  his  shares  to  John  and  profit  by  the  betrayal  of  Joe? 
Or  should  he  warn  Joe  and  be  a  traitor  to  John?  Or 
should  he  hang  on  to  the  shares  and  not  warn  Joe — prove 
his  good  faith  by  participating  in  his  ruin?  A  singularly 
sterile  attitude  this  would  be,  he  reflected,  and — appro 
priately — closest  to  his  natural  impulses! 

He  did  drop  off,  along  toward  morning,  overslept, 
missed  John's  sacred  train,  and  by  a  little  careful  dodging 
managed  to  ride  into  town  all  by  himself.  He  decided  he 
would  return  the  shares  to  John.  He  'd  said  he  would,  and 
then,  they  were  John's,  anyhow — carried  for  Henry.  Did 
this,  he  wondered,  in  any  way  lighten  the  burden  of  his 
disloyalty  to  Joe  ?  No,  it  didn  't.  Not  a  bit. 

He  went  straight  to  the  bank  from  the  train — it  was 
late  enough  for  that — got  the  shares  out  of  his  box  and 
took  them  up  to  John's  office  on  the  top  floor.  John  had 
gone  out  somewhere,  so  he  saw  Rollie  Mill.  Mindful  of 
John's  injunction  to  secrecy,  he  told  Mill,  discreetly,  hand 
ing  over  the  envelope,  that  this  was  something  he  had 


416         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

brought  in  for  John,  who  would  understand  all   about 
it. 

"Oh,  the  Greer  stock?"  asked  Rollie  nonchalantly. 
"Good!  I'll  take  care  of  it." 

Well,  of  course,  being  John's  interior  private  secre 
tary,  Rollie  would  know  all  about  it.  But  what  Rollie  went 
on  to  add  was  far  outside  the  secretarial  domain. 

"We're  going  to  toast  that  baby  a  nice  golden  brown 
before  we  get  done  with  him,"  he  prophesied  with  glee. 
"Remember  that  joke  he  pulled  up  here  one  day,  before 
we  organized  the  company,  about  oubliettes,  and  getting 
out  the  same  door  he  came  in  by?  Well,  that's  going  to 
be  a  better  joke  than  he  thought  it  was."  . 

Rollie  might  speak  frivolously,  but  he  didn't  say  things 
like  this  at  random.  So  this  was  all  John's  assertion  that 
they  had  no  plans — were  merely  playing  safe — amounted 
to!  Henry  didn't  want  to  hear  any  more.  He  knew  too 
much,  already.  He  left  John's  office  in  haste  and  plod 
ded,  drearily,  across  the  loop  to  his  own. 

The  specific  thing  he  dreaded  was  a  meeting  with  Jennie 
MacArthur.  He  had  never  felt  quite  comfortable  with  her 
since  John  had  told  him  on  the  day  of  his  return  from 
France,  the  inside  facts  of  Joe's  ruse  by  which  he  had  got 
control  of  the  majority  of  the  stock  in  the  company.  Henry 
had  often  gone  over  in  his  own  mind  the  part  Jennie  had 
played  in  it.  Her  bringing  to  him  the  warning  letter  from 
the  patent  lawyers,  her  overriding  of  his  tentative,  though 
audacious,  suggestion  that  they  manage  some  warning  to 
Joe  before  they  told  the  others.  He  remembered,  too,  her 
look  and  her  manner  at  the  directors'  table  through  those 
days  of  discussion. 

If  she  had  known  the  truth  all  the  while,  and  Henry 
could  not  seriously  doubt  that  this  was  the  case,  she  had 
played  her  part  well — and  just  as  well  before  himself  in 
their  private  talk  as  before  the  others.  He  couldn't  blame 
her  for  this,  but,  nevertheless,  the  conclusion  humiliated 
him.  Had  the  situation  been  reversed,  he  could  never, 
he  knew,  have  played  his  part  like  that. 


ROMANCE  417 

He  had  come  to  regard  Jennie,  long  before  that  time, 
with  a  genuine  and  unreserved  affection,  and  his  convic 
tion  had  been — a  very  warm  and  inspiring  conviction,  too, 
for  Henry — that  her  regard  for  him  was  of  the  same 
quality.  Well,  he  must  have  been  mistaken  about  that. 
If  she  had  really  liked  him  the  way  he  thought  she  did, 
she  could  not,  before  him,  have  played  her  part  so  skilfully. 
Some  momentary  hesitation,  some  troubled  protest,  would 
have  betrayed  her,  however  satisfactorily  she  might  have 
reasoned  it  out  that  her  duty  was  to  Joe. 

There  was  no  getting  away  from  the  logic  of  this  in 
ference,  but  his  instinct  persisted  upon  making  war  upon 
it.  The  thing  he  had  been  wanting  with  a  surprising 
intensity  all  those  months  was  a  candid  talk  with  her.  He 
wanted  to  say,  "Look  here,  Jennie,  did  you  know  what 
Joe  was  up  to  all  the  time  in  that  patent  infringement' 
business  ? ' ' 

Henry  had  had  a  part  of  his  own  to  play  ever  since  the 
April  meeting,  and  he  was  miserably  aware  that  he  had 
played  it  badly.  More  than  once  he  had  seen  Jennie  look 
ing  at  him  curiously,  perplexed,  and,  he  thought,  troubled 
by  something  she  found  in  his  manner. 

From  now  on,  of  course,  that  situation  was  going  to  be 
ten  times  worse.  He  had  committed  an  overt  act  in  turn 
ing  over  those  shares  to  John.  He  didn't  know  precisely 
what  John's  plans  were,  to  be  sure,  but  there  was  no  mis 
taking  a  broad  outline  of  them.  He  and  Corbett  and 
Crawford  were  going  to  slip  secretly  out  from  under,  and 
then  they  were  going  to  wreck  the  Greer  Company.  Push 
Joe  down  the  oubliette  he  had  once  joked  about. 

He  went  straight  into  his  private  office,  shut  the  door 
behind  him,  and  sat  down  at  his  desk.  Through  the  oak 
partition,  he  could  hear  Jennie  dictating  a  letter.  He  was 
conscious  of  the  hope  that  she  hadn't  heard  him  come  in. 
He  didn't  ring  for  his  own  stenographer,  though 
there  confronted  him  on  his  desk  two  or  three  stacks  of 
memoranda  and  letters,  the  grist  of  his  morning's  work. 
He  surveyed  them  blankly.  There  was  no  capacity  in 


418         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

him  for  orderly  thought.  His  mind  was  obsessed  by  a 
passionate  longing  to  escape  from  all  this  coil,  break  out 
into  an  open  space — and  it  wouldn't  have  to  be  very  wide 
— where  he  could  be  free. 

It  had  been,  he  ironically  remembered,  in  the  hope  of 
obtaining  this  freedom  that  he  had  left  the  bank,  and  come 
to  this  very  office.  It  was  Jennie  who  had  conducted  him 
here,  and  left  him  with  the  injunction  to  call  upon  her  for 
anything  he  wanted.  She  couldn't  give  him  what  he 
wanted  now. 

He  heard  her  dismiss  her  stenographer.  Then,  as  he 
had  feared,  there  came  a  tap  on  the  communicating  door. 
He  doubted  if  she  could  have  heard  his  almost  voiceless 
"Come  in,"  but  she  opened  the  door,  any  way,  and  after 
the  moment  it  took  to  exchange  good  mornings,  deliberately 
closed  it  after  her,  walked  around  his  desk,  and  seated 
herself,  facing  him.  He  looked  at  her  hands,  lightly 
clasped  upon  the  plate  glass  desk  top ;  but  he  couldn  't  look 
up  at  her  face.  He  could  feel  her  steady  gaze,  though, 
without  meeting  it. 

"You  don't  look  very  well,"  she  said.  "Was  Lake 
Forest  too  much  for  you?" 

"I  guess  it  was,"  he  assented.  "I  played  a  lot  of  ten 
nis  Saturday  afternoon — a  foolish  thing  for  a  man  of  my 
habits  to  attempt  of  course.  And  then  last  night,  for 
some  reason,  I  couldn't  sleep." 

He  wondered  if  that  sounded  as  false  to  her  as  it  did  to 
him.  Apparently  it  did,  for  after  a  protracted  silence, 
she  got  up  (not  restlessly  though;  all  her  movements  were 
gratefully  firm  and  steady)  and  went  to  the  window. 

"Henry,"  she  asked,  "isn't  there  anything  you  would 
like  to  talk  out  with  me?  Something  that's  been  on  your 
mind — oh,  for  a  good  while,  I  guess.  Personally,  I  mean, 
you  know;  man  to  man.  We  have  talked  like  that — but 
not  lately." 

He  had  an  appalling  sensation  of  sliding  down  a  smooth 
slope.  His  whole  moral  economy  was  threatened.  She 
had  hit  the  mark  fairly  with  her  first  shot,  He  sat  for  a 


ROMANCE  419 

while  in  panic-stricken  silence ;  but  she  simply  waited.  At 
last  he  said,  with  a  desperate  affectation  of  nonchalance, 
''No,  I  guess  not.  I  do  worry  a  lot,  of  course,  over  the 
business,  and  so  on.  I  don't  suppose  there's  as  worthless 
a  business  man  at  any  other  executive  desk  in  town.  There 
are  times  when  I  forget  it — and  there  are  times  when  it 
comes  over  me.  That's  all." 

He  thought  he  heard  her  catch  her  breath,  and  looking 
up  at  her  for  the  first  time,  saw  that  she  had  turned  a 
little  farther  away  from  him  and  was  gazing  out  of  the 
window.  Then,  hastily,  he  looked  back  at  the  meaning 
less  papers  upon  his  desk.  Presently,  she  moved  again, 
toward  her  own  door  this  time.  Her  way  lay  behind  his 
chair,  and  when  she  reached  that  point,  she  stopped.  Then 
he  felt  her  hands  upon  his  shoulders,  holding  them 
strongly.  Save  that  he  was  trembling  all  over,  he  sat  per 
fectly  still  until — he  had  no  idea  how  long  it  was — she  took 
her  hands  away,  and  went  back  into  her  own  office. 

In  an  instant  he  had  sprung  up  and  followed  her,  be 
fore  she  had  had  time  to  seat  herself  at  her  desk. 

"Jennie,"  he  said,  "there  isn't  a  single  human  relation  I 
care  about  in  the  world  that  isn't  poisoned  for  me  by  this 
damnable  job.  I'm  not  going  on  like  this.  It's  inhuman 
and  impossible.  I  can 't  talk,  man  to  man,  with  you  or  any 
body,  but  I  'm  going  to  fix  it  so  I  can.  Now — this  morning. ' ' 

He  went  back  into  his  own  office  at  that,  without  wait 
ing  for  a  word  or  a  look  by  way  of  reply,  caught  up  his 
hat,  and  went  out.  In  a  general  way,  it  was  in  his  mind 
that  he  would  find  John,  and  tell  him  to  go  to  hell. 

The  intention  fairly  intoxicated  him.  He  had  to  re 
strain  an  impulse  to  go  leaping  and  singing  along  Jackson 
Boulevard  as  Christian  went  along  the  narrow  way  after 
the  burden  of  his  sins  had  rolled  from  his  back.  Why 
hadn  't  he  done  this  long  ago  ?  Why  had  he  tortured  him 
self  all  these  months?  He  could  get  himself  some  sort  of 
job.  It  wouldn't  have  to  be  much  now  that  Margaret  was 
no  longer  on  his  hands.  He'd  get  it  of  a  stranger.  Then 
he'd  be  beholden  to  nobody. 


420         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

He  rode  up  in  the  elevator  to  the  top  floor  of  the  bank 
building,  ready  to  face  Goliath. 

He  was  glad,  though,  to  find  that  John  was  in  and 
that  he  needn't  wait.  He  didn't  want  any  of  his  pre 
cious  virtue  to  leak  out  of  him.  He  said  at  once,  without 
even  heeding  John's  invitation  to  sit  down: 

"I'm  going  to  resign  from  my  job  over  at  the  Greer 
Company.  I  thought  I'd  come  over  here  and  tell  you 
first." 

"Resign  from  your  job?"  John  said  blankly.  "What 
the  devil  ..." 

"You  see,  I  like  Joe,"  Henry  interrupted.  "No,  that 
isn't  strong  enough.  That  isn't  what  I  mean.  Joe's  one 
of  my  friends — one  of  my  best  friends — one  of  the  few 
real  friends  I've  got.  You've  always  thought  that  I  was 
making  up  to  him  for  business  reasons,  because  that  was 
what  I  had  been  hired  to  do.  Well,  it  isn't  true.  Never 
has  been  really,  from  the  first  day.  Now  you  see,  don't 
you,  why  I  can't  stay  there,  after  I  know  what  you're 
planning  to  do  to  him?  I'm  not  going  to  betray  any  con 
fidences — of  yours,  I  mean,  to  him.  I  won 't  tell  him  why 
I  got  out.  But  if  he  suspects  the  reason,  I  can't  help 
that.  That's  why  I'm  telling  you  first." 

"Sit  down,"  John  said  again,  and  he  waited  in  his 
impassive  way  until  Henry  had  done  so.  He  took  time, 
too,  to  light,  carefully  as  he  always  did,  a  cigar.  "Henry," 
he  said  judiciously,  "you're  a  nice  fellow,  but  you're  a 
damned  fool.  You've  been  in  business  all  your  life,  but 
by  George,  I  believe  you  get  your  ideas  about  it  from 
stories  you  read  in  the  magazines.  You've  got  an  idea 
we  're  going  after  Joe  Greer  to  ruin  him.  You  think  we  're 
going  to  sell  our  stock  on  purpose  to  work  some  skuldug 
gery  that  will  smash  him!" 

"Well,"  Henry  asked  bluntly,  "aren't  you?" 

John  shrugged  his  thick  shoulders,  and  heaved  a  patient 
sigh.  "You  ought  to  know  by  this  time  that  we  don't 
do  silly  things  like  that — not  people  like  Greg  and  Frank 
Crawford  and  me.  I  never  went  gunning  for  anybody  in 


ROMANCE  421 

my  life.  I  try  to  make  good  investments,  and  when  I've 
made  them,  I  try  to  protect  them.  I  give  you  my  word  I 
haven't  a  plan  in  my  head  beyond  what  I  told  you  yes 
terday  morning. 

"If  anybody  ruins  Joe  Greer,  it'll  be  Joe  Greer  himself. 
He's  the  sort  of  man  that's  liable  to  do  it.  We've  always 
known  that  about  him.  That's  why  we  wouldn't  let  him 
have  full  control  of  the  company  in  the  first  place.  He's 
the  sort  of  fellow  that  sooner  or  later  bites  off  more  than 
he  can  chew.  Well,  he's  got  full  control  of  the  company 
now.  He  got  it  by  a  trick — as  smooth  a  trick,  I'll  say,  as 
I  ever  saw  put  over.  We  can't  stop  him  now  at  the  di 
rectors'  table.  If  we  vote  him  down,  he  can  call  a  special 
stockholders'  meeting,  and  chuck  us  all  out.  So  we're 
getting  ready  to  stand  from  under. 

"He  may  make  good  after  we've  got  out,  thinking  he 
wasn't  going  to.  If  he  does,  it's  our  loss.  Or  we  may 
hang  on  too  long,  and  not  be  able  to  get  out,  and  that'll 
be  our  loss  again.  But  whatever  we  do,  it  won't  be  Greer 
we're  thinking  about.  It'll  be  our  investment  that  we're 
trying  to  protect.  That  ought  to  be  satisfactory,  I  should 
think. — I  'd  like  to  know, ' '  he  concluded  reflectively,  ' '  what 
ever  put  the  other  idaa  into  your  head  ? ' ' 

Henry  didn't  give  Rollie  Mill  away.  "I  don't  know," 
he  said.  He  was  deeply  troubled.  He  remembered  John's 
impatient  admission  last  summer  that  Joe  would  be  indis 
pensable  for  another  year  at  least,  and  his  own  instruc 
tions  to  "keep  him  on  the  rails."  And  yet,  John  wasn't  a 
liar,  and  John  had  just  given  him  his  solemn  word  that 
he  was  innocent  of  any  plan  for  a  campaign  against  Joe. 

"I  suppose,"  he  said  at  last,  "that  if  you  do  stand  from 
under,  and  Joe  isn't  able  to — chew  what  he  has  bitten 
off,  there'll  be  some  sort  of  reorganization." 

John  shot  a  quick  look  at  him.  ' '  Well,  I  '11  say  this.  I  '11 
make  this  as  a  promise  to  you.  If  we  do  have  to  pick  the 
thing  up  and  reorganize  it — and  of  course  that  may  happen 
— we  '11  give  Greer  a  perfectly  fair  chance  to  come  in  on  the 
same  terms  as  the  rest.  How's  that?  Will  that  do?" 


422         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

''I  haven't  any  right  to  dictate  terms,"  Henry  protested. 
"And  I  realize  you've  been  very  patient  with  me." 

(It  was  just  John's  patience  that  defeated  him,  lowered 
his  exaltation,  destroyed  his  confidence.  He  was  the  old 
Henry  again,  trembling  a  little,  horribly  in  doubt.) 

"I  still  feel,  though,  that  my  position  is  false  over 
there,"  he  went  on.  "I  am  supposed  to  represent  your 
interests — to  be  on  your  side  ..." 

"Forget  that  you  are  on  our  side,"  John  interrupted. 
"Your  own  sense  of  fair  play  is  good  enough  for  us.  Go 
ahead  and  be  treasurer,  without  any  strings  on  you  at  all. 
You're  valuable  over  there  to  Greer.  You're  an  impor 
tant  part  of  his  organization. ' ' 

He  got  up,  with  a  laugh,  and  slapped  his  wife's  cousin 
on  the  back.  "Forget  it,  Henry.  Run  along  back  to 
your  office.  You  must  have  had  a  bad  night." 

"I  did,"  Henry  admitted  feebly.  "But  I've  been 
worrying  about  this  for  a  great  deal  longer  than  that." 

"Well,  you've  got  it  off  your  chest  now,  anyhow.  Sorry 
I  can 't  ask  you  to  lunch,  but  I  've  got  some  people  waiting 
for  me." 

Henry  walked  back  to  his  own  office,  no  longer  buoy 
ant,  feeling  a  fool,  wondering  what  he  was  going  to  say 
to  Jennie. 

But  this,  oddly  enough,  did  not  prove  difficult.  He 
did  not  see  her  till  after  lunch,  and  then  she  met  him  with 
a  matter  upon  which  she  wanted  his  advice.  A  man  who 
said  he  was  a  special  article  writer  for  a  popular  scien 
tific  magazine  had  telephoned  and  asked  if  he  might  come 
over  and  talk  to  her  with  the  idea  of  getting  a  story.  Did 
Henry  think  there  would  be  any  objection  to  her  seeing 
him?  She  was  rather  curious  to  find  out  just  what  he 
wanted.  Henry  didn't  see  the  smallest  objection,  and 
said  so,  whereupon  she  nodded  and  went  back  into  her 
office. 

They  had  met.  Their  normal  every-day  relation  was 
reestablished  as  if  the  explosion  of  the  morning  had  never 
occurred.  But,  somehow,  he  couldn  't  feel  satisfied  to  let  it 


ROMANCE  423 

go  at  that,  and  five  minutes  later  he  followed  her  in  and 
sat  down  on  the  corner  of  her  desk. 

"I've  come  back,  Jennie,"  he  said.  "When  I  went  off 
this  morning,  I  didn't  think  I  would.  I'd  misunderstood 
something  John  Williamson  said  yesterday,  and  it  had 
been — preying  on  my  mind.  It  was  the  climax,  really,  of 
a  series  of  misunderstandings.  I'd  had  the  idea  that  they 
regarded  me  as  some  one — well,  retained  in.  their  special 
interest  rather  than  in  the  company's,  a  perfectly  false 
position,  of  course.  But  John  has  just  assured  me  that 
isn't  so.  They  don't  consider  there  are  any  strings  tied  to 
me,  at  all.  I  'm  treasurer  of  this  company,  and  I  'm  nothing 
else.  So  it's  all  right.  That's  what  I  blew  up  about.  I 
know  I  must  look — well,  a  good  bit  of  a  fool,  to  you." 

She  didn't  smile,  as  his  tone  at  the  end  had  invited  her 
to  do,  nor  look  up  at  him.  She  sat  very  still,  for  a 
moment,  without  speaking.  Then  she  said,  "I  think  you 
are  one  of  the  bravest  people  I've  ever  known." 

He  laughed  at  that,  but  not  ironically.  "It  did  take  a 
sort  of  courage  to  go  over  and  tell  John  to  go  to  the  devil, 
but  it  wasn't  mine.  It  came  from  your  hands.  I've 
never  been — taken  hold  of  like  that,  not  that  I  can  remem 
ber,  in  all  my  life." 

She  flushed,  and  the  hands  he  had  spoken  of,  which  had 
been  lying  easily  on  the  desk  before  her,  disappeared  be 
neath  it.  This  time  she  said  nothing  at  all. 

"I'm  much  obliged,  Jennie,"  he  concluded,  after  a 
while,  and  then  went  back  into  his  own  office. 

11 

Jennie's  principal  concern  that  summer  was  the  prob 
lem  of  marketing  the  raw  flax  which  they  were  under 
contract  to  buy  as  it  was  delivered  during  the  fall  and 
winter  by  the  subsidiary  companies.  There  was  going  to 
be  a  lot  of  it — over  thirty  million  pounds — and  the  only 
comfortable  way  to  handle  it  would  be  by  securing  in  ad 
vance  contracts  with  jobbers  or  spinners,  under  which 
they  could  keep  it  turning  over  as  fast  as  it  came  in. 


424         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

She  and  Henry  had,  as  well  as  they  could,  attended  to 
the  preliminaries  of  this  undertaking.  They  had  sur 
veyed  the  whole  textile  field,  more  or  less.  They  had  made 
promising  follow-up  campaigns  in  all  quarters  where  it 
seemed  likely  that  an  interest  in  their  product  could  be 
aroused.  The  textile  world  had  shown  no  lack  of  interest 
in  the  Greer  process.  Engineers  came  out  to  visit  the 
laboratory,  mills  took  their  samples,  letters  came  in  from 
everywhere. 

The  only  disquieting  phenomenon  about  all  this  activity 
was  that  it  never  got  beyond  the  preliminary  stage.  The 
experts  came  and  looked,  went  away  and  experimented, 
and  made  their  reports,  in  the  main  highly  favorable ;  but 
these  reports  seemed  to  disappear  into  some  vast  inane 
which  gave  back  nothing,  not  even  a  responsive  echo.  By 
the  middle  of  September,  Jennie  was  frankly  alarmed 
about  it.  And  in  Henrv,  this  alarm  was  amplified  many 
fold. 

It  troubled  them  both,  too,  that  they  couldn't  arouse 
Joe  to  the  seriousness  of  the  situation.  His  attitude  still 
seemed  to  be,  as  well  as  they  could  make  it  out  from  his 
irregular,  inadequate  letters,  that  getting  out  the  flax  was 
of  paramount  importance,  just  as  getting  out  the  gold  was 
of  paramount  importance  if  you  were  operating  a  gold 
mine.  If  they  had  the  only  adequate  supply  of  good  stuff 
to  meet  a  real  demand,  they  needn't  worry  about  selling 
it.  The  shoe  was  on  the  other  foot. 

"I  can't  see,"  Jennie  confided  to  Henry,  "why  he's 
staying  around  up  there.  All  but  two  or  three  of  those 
mills  have  already  got  stuff  coming  through.  I've  done 
all  I  can  in  the  way  of  writing  letters  to  get  him  back.  He 
says  he'll  come  about  the  first  of  the  month.  You  know, 
I  think  somebody,  one  of  us,  ought  to  go  up  there  and  talk 
to  him." 

Henry  thought  this  a  good  idea,  but  insisted  that  there 
was  no  question  about  Jennie's  being  the  one  to  go.  "You 
can  talk  up  to  him,  which  is  something  I  never  could  do 
in  the  world." 


ROMANCE  425 

"I've  been  talking  up  to  him  for  seven  or  eight  years, 
off  and  on,"  Jennie  pointed  out.  "He's  used  to  me. 
You've  never  tried  to,  and  you  might  have  a  lot  more  ef 
fect."  But  he  looked  so  acutely  miserable  over  this  sug 
gestion,  that  Jennie  hastily  agreed  to  make  the  journey. 

She  said  to  Henry  when  he  greeted  her  on  the  morning 
of  her  return,  and  asked  her  what  luck  she  had  had  with 
Joe:  "We'll  have  lunch  together  somewhere,  Henry,  and 
then  I'll  tell  you.  I  don't  want  to  talk  about  it  here." 

That  she  had  come  upon  something  seriously  disturbing 
during  her  visit,  her  manner  made  plain  enough,  but  she 
gave  Henry  no  clue  to  the  nature  of  it  until  they  were 
seated  at  a  corner  table  in  the  old  Stratford  dining-room 
and  had  got  rid  of  the  waiter.  Then,  however,  she  came 
straight  to  the  point. 

"I  didn't  get  anything  out  of  Joe,"  she  said.  "He 
won't  come  back  to  Chicago  until  the  first  of  October. 
He's  acting  queer  about  that — stubborn.  Wouldn't  listen 
to  reason  at  all.  And  even  if  he  did  come,  I  don 't  believe 
he'd  be  much  help  to  us,  the  way  he  is  right  now." 

"Do  you  mean  there's  anything  the  matter  with  him? 
Isn't  he— well?" 

"He's  drinking  too  much,"  Jennie  answered  bluntly. 

Henry  made  a  grimace  at  that.  The  picture  her  words 
formed  in  his  mind  was  of  nightly  bucolic  carousals. 
"How  did  you  find  out  about  it?"  he  asked  after  a 
moment  of  unhappy  meditation.  "Did  they  talk  to  you 
about  it?" 

"They  don't  know,"  she  said.  "Nobody  knows.  He 
doesn't  get  drunk,  Henry.  You  wouldn't  know,  unless 
you'd  always  known  him,  that  there  was  anything  wrong. 
He  just  drinks." 

"Well,  but  he's  always  drunk  whisky — like  water," 
Henry  protested.  "I  never  could  see  that  it  affected  him 
at  all." 

"He  doesn't  drink  it  like  water  now.  That  is  exactly 
how  he  used  to  drink  it — without  thinking  anything  about 
it;  whenever  he  was  thirsty.  But  now  .  .  .  Oh,  it  was 


426         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

rotten  to  see  him  like  that.  He's  ashamed  about  it.  But 
he  needs  it.  After  he's  been  around  with  you  a  while,  he 
makes  an  excuse  for  going  away  by  himself  to  get  it,  be 
cause  he  can't  stand  it  any  longer  without  it.  It  just 
happened  that  I  found  it  out,  and  when  I  did  it  made  me — 
sick. — No,  I  didn't  say  anything  to  him  about  it.  What 
would  be  the  use  ?  It 's  been  going  on  a  long  while,  I  guess. 
Since  before  he  went  north  this  spring." 

Henry  remembered  the  drink  he'd  seen  Joe  take  after 
the  April  meeting,  and  the  look  Joe  had  shot  at  him  when 
he  commented  on  it.  Half  incredulous  as  he  remained 
after  Jennie's  report,  he  was  still  horrified.  "Something 
ought  to  be  done  about  it,"  he  said.  "It's — ghastly,  if  it's 
really  as  bad  as  it  seemed  to  you." 

"It  is,"  she  asserted.  "I'm  not  mistaken  about  that. 
But  he's  the  only  person  who  can  do  anything  about  it. 
"When  he  gets  around  to  it,  I  suppose  he  will.  When  he's 
got  over  the  thing  that  drove  him  to  it.  It  is  ghastly,  of 
course,  but  I  don't  believe  anything  like  that  will  ever  get 
Joe,  permanently.  I  think,  perhaps,  from  things  he 's  said, 
that  he's  been  like  this  before.  Never  since  I've  known 
him,  though.  Oh,  I  've  known  him  to  go  on  horrible  sprees, 
of  course.  Lasting  a  whole  week  sometimes.  But  he 
only  laughed  at  them.  This  is  different." 

These  revelations  were  so  appalling  to  Henry  that  he 
quite  forgot  what  Jennie's  original  errand  to  the  North 
had  been,  along  with  the  apprehensions  which  had  caused 
her  to  undertake  it.  Not  so,  Jennie.  She  came  back  to  flax. 

"They  aren't  as  happy  up  there  as  they  were  when  Joe 
was  organizing  those  subsidiaries,"  she  told  Henry. 
"They're  furious  over  the  way  wheat's  gone  down.  They 
think  it's  all  the  doings  of  the  speculators.  They're  wor 
ried  over  tight  money  and  the  way  the  banks  are  shutting 
down  on  new  credits.  They  think  that's  part  of  a  con 
spiracy,  too." 

"Oh,  we've  all  got  our  troubles,  I  suppose,"  Henry  re 
marked  from  rather  far  afield ;  ' '  and  our  own  always  seem 
like  the  only  ones  in  the  world." 


ROMANCE  427 

"These  are  our  troubles  I'm  talking  about,"  she  told 
him  crisply.  "That  is,  they're  going  to  be.  You  see, 
practically  all  those  little  flax  companies  borrowed  the 
money  that  they  bought  the  straw  with.  It  was  easy 
enough  to  get,  then.  But  now  the  local  banks  are  wanting 
those  notes  paid  up,  and  that  means  that  the  subsidiaries 
won't  be  able  to  give  us  any  time  at  all.  They'll  draw  on 
us,  as  soon  as  they  can  begin  to  ship,  cash  against  bills  of 
lading.  We'll  have  to  begin  meeting  those  drafts  in  a 
couple  of  weeks.  We're  all  right  for  a  while,  of  course, 
but  this  is  going  to  run  into  millions,  Henry.  And  the 
stuff  we're  going  to  buy,  until  we've  established  a  market 
for  it,  isn't  anything  the  banks  will  take  for  collateral, 
either." 

A  prediction  of  John  Williamson  stabbed  through 
Henry's  memory  like  a  neuralgia.  "Sooner  or  later,  this 
man  Greer  will  bite  off  more  than  he  can  chew. ' '  Had  he 
already  done  it?  Henry  wondered.  And  then  Jennie 
startled  him  by  mentioning  John  herself.  She  suggested 
that  Henry  go  and  talk  to  him.  Not  to  ask  for  any 
thing  more  than  advice,  of  course,  though  he  might  be  able 
to  put  them  in  touch  with  some  one  who  knew  the  jobbing 
game  better  than  they  did.  Bankers  had  all  sorts  of  con 
nections  like  that.  Anyhow,  Mr.  Williamson  had  not 
been  in  the  office  for  several  weeks  and  he  ought  to  be 
kept  informed  of  the  general  situation. 

Henry  didn't  much  want  to  do  this.  He'd  been  avoid 
ing  John  of  late,  on  instinct  rather  than  from  any  for- 
mulable  reason,  but  this  wasn't  a  fact  he  cared  to  confess 
to  Jennie,  so  he  said  he  would  go.  He  telephoned  him  that 
same  afternoon  and  John  invited  him  to  lunch  at  the 
Union  League  the  next  day — to  Henry's  relief  at  getting 
out  of  a  visit  to  John's  office.  He  had  conceived  a  posi 
tive  horror  of  another  encounter  with  Rollie  Mill. 

John  proved  friendly  and  in  the  upshot  rather  reassur 
ing  than  otherwise.  He  seemed  to  think  it  natural  enough 
that  their  progress  had  been  slow  with  the  big  jobbers  and 
that  nothing  much  would  be  gained  by  trying  to  hurry 


428         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

them.  The  times  were  a  bit  unsettled  and  nobody  wanted 
to  commit  himself  any  sooner  than  he  had  to.  If  Greer 
was  coming  back  in  a  fortnight  or  so  (Henry  had  forborne 
to  mention  the  fact  that  Jennie  had  been  up  to  see  him) 
that  would  be  time  enough.  He  could  run  down  to  New 
York  and  very  likely  close  up  everything  in  a  week.  Those 
things  usually  happened  all  at  once. 

They  talked  through  the  meal  in  this  comfortable  vein, 
and  then  when  they  began  to  smoke  John  leaned  back  in 
his  chair  and  asked  Henry  where  he'd  been  all  this  while. 
They'd  seen  nothing  of  him  for  weeks.  Henry  leaned 
back,  too,  with  a  sigh  of  relief  as  he  realized  that  business 
was  finished  and  that  John  was  not  going  to  ask  any  ques 
tions  about  Joe  nor  say  anything  about  the  sale  of  the 
stock.  He  answered  that  he'd  been  pretty  busy,  and 
Margaret,  too,  with  her  new  job,  but  that  they'd  both 
been  meaning  to  get  around  for  a  long  while. 

' '  Violet  asks  about  you  every  few  days, ' '  John  told  him. 
"Seems  to  have  you  on  her  mind.  Dorothy,  too.  You're  a 
great  favorite  with  her,  Henry.  You'll  have  to  come 
around  pretty  soon  if  you're  going  to  see  her  before  she 
goes  away.  She's  leaving  about  the  first  of  October." 

"Leaving?"  Henry  inquired,  surprised.  "I  thought 
she'd  come  home  to  stay  for  a  while." 

' '  So  did  I, ' '  said  John,  in  a  tone  that  was  nearer  angry 
than  one  often  heard  from  him,  "but  it  seems  we  were  mis 
taken.  She's  going  abroad  for  the  winter,  to  a  school  in 
Florence.  Violet's  got  it  figured  out  that  she's  too  young 
to  come  out  yet,  and  says  she  doesn't  want  her  hanging 
around  all  the  year  at  a  loose  end.  It  sounds  reasonable 
enough  when  she  talks  about  it,  but  damn  it,  I  was  hoping 
for  a  chance  to  get  acquainted  with  the  child  myself. 
After  she  starts  going  out  to  dinners  and  dances  on  her 
own  every  night,  I  won't  have  a  look  in." 

"What  does  Dodo  say  about  it  herself?"  Henry  asked. 
"She  want  to  go?" 

"Says  she  does.  One  of  her  particular  friends  at 
Thornycroft  is  going,  and  it's  a  wonderful  school,  and  so 


ROMANCE  429 

on ;  but  I  Ve  got  sort  of  an  idea .  .  .     However,  there  it  is. 
October  first,  she  goes." 

Henry  inquired  if  Violet  were  going  over  with  her. 

"No,"  John  said.  "The  other  girl's  mother  is  to  take 
the  pair  of  them.  That  is  unless  Margaret's  planning  to 
go  about  that  time.  I  hadn't  thought  to  ask  about  that, 
nor  Violet  either,  I  guess.  How  about  it?" 

But  Margaret,  Henry  said,  had  found  she  wasn't  going 
to  be  able  to  get  off  till  after  Christmas. 

"I  don't  know  what  Violet's  planning  to  do,"  John 
added,  as  they  left  the  table.  "She's  been  so  busy  lately 
getting  Dodo  packed  off  that  I  don't  believe  she's  had  time 
to  think." 

12 

Between  Dorothy's  sailing  date  and  Joe's  for  his  return 
to  Chicago  there  was  a  direct  relation.  Back  in  August 
he  had  received  this  letter  from  Violet: — 

"I  asked  Henry  the  other  day  when  you  were  coming 
back  and  he  said  he  thought  within  two  or  three  weeks. 
At  first  I  was  glad,  for  it  seems  a  long  time  since  that 
Fourth  of  July  week-end,  but  I've  come  to  think  I  don't 
want  to  see  you  again  with  Dorothy  about.  She  looks  at 
me,  Joe — Margaret  looks  at  me,  too,  as  if  she'd  like  to 
slay  me,  and  I  don 't  mind  a  bit.  She 's  never  forgiven  me 
and  I  suppose  never  will.  Dorothy  is  as  dear  as  she  can 
be,  fond  of  me,  and  admires  me  and  all  that,  but  sometimes 
she  makes  me  feel  a  fool.  I  couldn't  stand  it — 

"We've  decided  she's  to  go  to  school  for  one  more  year — 
she  is  too  young  to  come  out — in  Italy  and  she  sails  about 
the  first  of  October,  a  little  late  that  is  but  I  can't  get 
her  ready  any  sooner.  The  Hallams,  New  York  people, 
are  putting  their  girl  in  the  same  school  and  she  '11  go  over 
with  them.  I  suppose  I  shall  go  to  New  York  and  see  her 
off,  and  then  I  '11  come  home  and  there  won 't  be  anybody — 

' '  I  know  if  you  came  to  Chicago  before  that,  we  'd  be  see 
ing  each  other — and  I'd  hate  it.  So  I'm  hoping  you  will 
come — then.  I  wonder  if  that  seems  idiotic  to  you." 

It  did  not  seem  idiotic  to  Joe.  It  seemed  sensitive,  high- 
minded,  thoroughbred.  It  added  a  glamorous  brush- 


430 

stroke  or  two  to  the  romantic  portrait  of  Violet  his  fancy 
had  been  so  industriously  painting.  Also  it  fed  his  hopes. 
He  read  into  its  broken  sentences  admissions  which  fell  but 
little  short  of  promises.  He  gave  her  no  hint  of  this,  how 
ever,  in  his  answer  to  her  letter.  It  was  not  so  much  that 
he  distributed  his  powers  of  expression  on  paper  as  that 
he  hated  to  forego,  in  any  matter  where  the  stake  was  se 
rious,  the  uncanny  advantage  he  derived  from  his  sensitive 
ness  to  personal  contacts.  All  he  told  her  in  his  matter-of- 
fact  reply  was  that  he  was  sure  his  business  would  keep 
him  in  the  North  until  October  first.  Another  letter  of 
hers  furnished  him  further  details,  the  exact  date  of  sail 
ing  and  the  name  of  the  ship,  when  they  planned  to  leave 
Chicago,  and  so  on,  and  this  had  an  influence  not  fully 
acknowledged  to  himself  in  the  forming  of  his  own  plans. 

Jennie's  visit  in  mid-September  accomplished  more  with 
him  than  she  supposed.  It  had  seemed  to  her  that  he 
barely  listened  to  her,  but  his  mind,  his  thinking  machine 
that  is  to  say,  unintoxicated  either  by  alcohol  or  by  ro 
mance,  took  it  all  in,  set  it  in  order,  and  summed  it  up. 
There  wasn  't  anything  seriously  amiss,  he  decided.  It  was 
just  that  Jennie,  with  all  her  clarity  of  judgment  and  all 
her  energy,  lacked  the  high-voltage  current  in  her  veins 
that  it  took  to  jump  a  gap,  produce  a  lightning  flash, 
finish  a  thing  up.  This  lack  was  about  all  that  kept  her 
from  being  as  good  a  man  as  he  was.  When  this  was  called 
for,  she  needed  him. 

Within  a  week  of  her  return  to  Chicago,  Joe  conceived 
an  attractive  project.  He'd  go  straight  to  New  York  from 
here,  by  way  of  the  ' '  Soo, ' '  and  close  his  contracts  for  the 
year's  output  of  raw  linen  before  he  came  back  October 
first.  It  would  be  fun  to  see  their  faces,  Jennie's  and 
Henry's,  long  and  solemn  enough  when  he  came  in,  change 
when  he  tossed  down  those  papers  on  his  desk  before  their 
eyes.  That  would  show  them  whether  he  was  the  old 
Joe  or  not! 

The  other  not  quite  acknowledged  half  of  the  picture 
•was  his  accidental  meeting  with  Violet  after  Dorothy's 


ROMANCE  431 

boat  had  sailed.  It  would  be  easy  enough  to  manage  since 
he  knew  the  hotel  the  Williamsons  were  addicted  to  in  New 
York;  they'd  both  talked  about  it.  He  wouldn't  go  near 
her,  indeed  he'd  take  pains  to  avoid  a  chance  meeting, 
until  the  child  was  out  of  the  way,  but  the  possibilities 
offered  by  the  subsequent  handful  of  hours  were  breath 
taking — especially  if  by  that  time  he  had  his  signed  con 
tracts  in  his  pocket. 

He  felt  no  serious  doubt  of  his  success  in  this.  On  the 
train  east  he  read  all  the  correspondence  between  his  Chi 
cago  office  and  the  New  York  houses  they  had  been  try 
ing  to  land.  No,  he  didn't  wonder  Jennie  had  failed. 
You  didn't  galvanize  people  into  taking  drastic  action  by 
writing  them  pleasantly  reasonable  letters.  You  had  to 
exhibit  opportunity  in  such  colors  and  odors  and  propin 
quity  that  their  mouths  watered  for  it,  and  then  let  them 
see  it  slipping  away — into  the  clutch  of  somebody  else! 

But  from  the  start,  on  Monday  morning,  he  met  unfore 
seen  difficulties.  He  found  plenty  of  people  who  were 
glad  to  talk  with  him  but  these  were  the  hirelings,  experts 
and  such.  The  big  people,  to  a  baffling  degree,  were  in 
accessible  ;  physically  inaccessible  in  the  first  place,  and 
when  he  had  got  into  their  bodily  presence,  spiritually. 
Their  urbanity  disconcerted  him  and  drove  him,  when  he 
tried  to  assert  himself,  to  the  opposite  manner,  which,  he 
was  aware,  only  made  the  abyss  between  them  wider. 
They  were  like  Williamson,  only  worse.  Before  the  week 
was  over  he  was  wishing  he  had  John  there  as  an  ally. 
They  wouldn't  be  so  damn  superior  with  him! 

There  were  moments,  too,  though  these  only  occurred 
when  he  needed  a  drink,  when  he  wondered  whether  he 
himself  was  really  the  man  he'd  been  a  year  ago.  Would 
not  that  man  have  had  a  spark  in  him  irresistible  enough 
to  have  jumped  this  gap — wide  as  it  was  ?  But  a  good  big 
drink  of  whisky  or  so  availed  as  a  rule  to  wash  this  agoniz 
ing  question  out  of  his  thoughts. 

He  spent  Saturday  morning  alone  in  his  room.  His 
week's  campaign  had  ended  perforce  on  Friday  when 


432         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

everybody  who  could  be  any  good  to  him  disappeared,  from 
the  haunts  of  trade  at  any  rate,  for  the  week-end.  It  had 
got  him  nowhere.  But — hadn't  it?  No  nearer  his  goal, 
certainly.  Yet  he  could  not  quite  ignore  an  impression 
he  had  caught  from  the  last  man  he  had  talked  to.  This 
man,  pleasant  enough  and  not  too  obviously  in  a  hurry  to 
be  rid  of  him,  had  once  or  twice,  at  some  assertion  of  Joe's, 
permitted  himself  to  smile,  faintly  and  a  little  impatiently, 
as  if  he  knew  there  was  nothing  to  be  dreaded  from  his 
competitors.  "Was  this  bland  non-committal  attitude  he 
had  been  meeting  everywhere  a  thing  agreed  upon?  It 
•was  not  a  pleasant  sort  of  hunch  to  get. 

Only  a  corner  of  his  mind,  though,  was  concerned  with 
this  question.  The  rest  of  it  was  watching  the  clock.  It 
was  ten  o'clock  and  Violet  and  Dorothy  would  be  leaving 
the  hotel  in  a  taxi  for  the  pier;  ten-thirty,  and  they 
would  be  getting  aboard;  eleven,  and  they'd  have  seen  the 
luggage  stowed  away,  met  the  other  woman  and  her 
daughter.  The  agent  of  the  line  would  be  bustling  about 
arranging  special  privileges,  instructing  the  purser  and 
the  head  stewards.  Eleven-thirty;  the  gongs  beating  "All 
ashore!"  and  Violet  contentedly  ignoring  them  until  the 
last  minute  before  they  began  casting  off  the  gangplank 
lashings.  "Would  she  wait  at  the  pier-head  for  the  last 
wave  of  a  handkerchief?  Joe  got  restlessly  out  of  his 
chair  and  then  sat  down  again.  He  had  considered  going 
down  to  the  gate  to  the  pier  at  about  this  time  and  inter 
cepting  Violet  there,  where  there  would  be  no  chance  of 
missing  her,  but  had  reluctantly  decided  against  it.  There 
could  be  no  look  of  accident  about  an  encounter  like  that 
and  it  might  be  awkward.  Suppose,  for  instance,  some  of 
her  New  York  friends  had  gone  along  with  her  to  see  the 
girl  off.  Violet  would  be  furious  with  him  for  butting  into 
a  party  like  that.  No,  it  was  safer  to  stick  to  the  hotel  and 
trust  to  luck. 

It  was  a  small  hotel  as  these  go  in  New  York,  and  its 
plan  suited  admirably  with  the  stratagem  Joe  had  in  mind. 
There  was  but  one  entrance  and  it  was  possible  to  get  a 


ROMANCE  433 

table  in  the  main  restaurant,  to  the  left  as  you  went  in, 
that  commanded  it.  Joe  could  take  a  seat  here,  order  his 
lunch,  and  await  Violet's  appearance  at  his  leisure. 

An  irritating  misadventure  befell  him  soon  after  he'd 
chosen  his  table  and  given  the  waiter  his  indifferent  order. 
Another  guest  entering  the  restaurant  whom  Joe  had 
looked  at  without  seeing  stopped  suddenly  in  the  act  of 
passing  his  table,  stared  at  him,  slapped  him  heavily  on 
the  shoulder,  and  called  him  Joe.  If  he  could  have  de 
composed  the  fellow  into  his  elements  with  a  wish,  he 
would  have  done  so.  His  memory  was  at  a  loss  for  him  at 
first,  and  when  it  got  him,  it  didn't  help  much.  A  chap 
named  Snell,  he  was,  whom  Joe  had  known  pretty  well  but 
regarded  little,  years  ago  down  in  Santiago  de  Chile. 

But  to  Snell,  unhappily,  the  encounter  was  an  event  to 
make  much  of.  Ignoring  the  want  of  an  invitation,  he 
sat  down  at  Joe's  table  and  began  pouring  out  his  story  of 
the  intervening  years.  His  only  regret  was  that  he  hadn  't 
known  enough  to  come  to  New  York  sooner.  There  was 
no  other  place  like  it  for  easy  money.  The  people  down 
here  didn't  wait  for  you  to  take  it  away  from  them;  they 
came  and  handed  it  to  you.  Perfectly  straight  legitimate 
business,  of  course,  he  was  talking  about.  There  was 
nothing  in  the  crooked  stuff ;  it  wasn  't  big  enough. 

"What  was  he  in  ?  Oh,  anything  that  came  along.  He  'd 
cleaned  up  big  on  one  or  two  moving-picture  promotions, 
but  the  real  standby  was  the  curb.  He'd  made  an  enor 
mous  thing  in  the  recent  raids  on  some  of  the  big  indus 
trials.  He  didn't  mind  telling  Joe  that  in  one  week  on 
So-and-So  alone  he  won  a  quarter  of  a  million  dollars. 
Snell  didn't  claim  any  credit  particularly,  he  said,  for  his 
success.  The  system  was  perfectly  simple:  you  cut  your 
losses  and  let  your  winnings  ride.  All  a  man  needed  was 
nerve  and  a  good  hunch.  The  trouble  was  that  most  men 
who  had  the  nerve  lacked  the  hunch,  and  most  who  had 
the  hunch  lacked  the  nerve. 

This  would  have  annoyed  Joe  more  bitterly  than  it  did 
if  he'd  half  listened  to  it.  He  was  watching  with  an  in- 


434         JOSEPH  GREEE  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

tense  concentration  of  his  faculties,  the  slice  of  the  lobby 
that  Violet  would  have  to  cross  when  she  came  into  the 
hotel.  Quarter  to  one!  If  she  was  coming  at  all,  it 
would  be  soon.  Snell  glided  on — he  was  sitting  sidelong 
to  the  table  now  and  leaning  confidentially  toward  Joe — 
to  dwell  upon  the  Capuan  delights  which  the  city  offered 
its  conquerors.  Some  town !  Why  only  last  night  he  had 
been  in  on  a  small  party  where  one  of  the  guests  had  been 
no  less  a  person  than  Polly  Price  herself.  Polly  Price! 
The  girl  that  had  married  four  millionaires  in  three  years, 
and  dug  into  all  of  them  pretty  deep  at  that.  Snell  dis 
passionately  pronounced  that  he  couldn't  see  her;  didn't 
know  how  she  got  away  with  it.  Certainly  she'd  never 
get  any  hundred  thousand  dollar  "lavaleers"  out  of  him. 
But  there  were  others,  all  right,  less  expensive — not  that 
Snell  minded  that,  though — and  a  whole  lot  better.  Joe 
had  once  been  quite  a  lady's  man  himself.  If  he  was  in 
terested  .  .  . 

The  words  fell  on  an  ear  that  was  at  last  totally  deaf. 
Joe  saw,  pausing  a  moment  at  the  head  of  the  shallow 
stairway  and  then  turning  toward  the  restaurant,  not 
Violet,  but  her  husband. 

For  a  moment  the  sight  of  him  was  blankly  incredible, 
and  for  another  after  that  the  wild  idea  darted  about  in 
his  brain  that  Williamson  had  come  suspecting  something 
amiss — a  rendezvous!  Impossible  of  course.  Violet  her 
self  had  known  nothing  of  Joe's  coming  to  New  York.  He 
had  himself  in  hand  again,  at  least  as  far  as  appearances 
went,  before  John's  eye  fell  upon  him,  and  was  able  to 
return  his  nod  composedly  enough.  John  looked  surprised 
to  see  him  there,  but  not  startled.  He  moved  a  few  steps 
toward  Joe's  table,  but  after  a  glance  at  Snell,  sheered  off 
and  seated  himself  at  the  other  side  of  the  room. 

An  almost  unbearable  sense  of  frustration  settled  upon 
Joe.  Williamson's  presence  was  explicable  enough.  He'd 
come  down  to  see  his  daughter  off  to  Europe,  either  with 
his  wife  or  in  her  stead.  Perhaps  Violet  had  after  all 
changed  her  mind  and  gone  off  to  Italy  with  Dorothy. 
Anyhow  the  hope  of  a  few  untrammeled  hours  with  her, 


ROMANCE  435 

which  he'd  been  leaning  on,  much  more  heavily  than  he 
had  realized,  was  broken. 

After  a  few  minutes  of  gloomy  cogitation  it  seemed  nec- 
cessary  that  he  talk  to  John  at  once.  He  pushed  back  his 
chair  and  rose.  "There's  a  man  just  came  in,"  he  said 
to  Snell,  "that  I  had  a  sort  of  date  with  for  lunch.  I 
guess  I'd  better  go  over  and  join  him.  Glad  I  saw  you." 

"So 'in  I,"  said  Snell  heartily.  "Look  me  up  some 
time."  He  told  Joe  his  address  and  insisted  he  write  it 
down.  "And,"  he  added  confidentially,  "if  you  want 
to  meet  any  classy  girls  ..." 

"Or  want  three  or  four  million  dollars?"  Joe  inter 
rupted  with  a  dry  grin. 

"Well,  that  wouldn't  stump  me,  either,"  Snell  retorted 
a  little  truculently.  He  twisted  his  mouth  as  he  spoke  as 
if  he  were  shifting  a  cigar  into  one  corner  of  it.  "Look 
me  up,  anyhow,"  he  concluded  cordially. 

Joe  said  he  would,  and  crossed  the  room  to  John  Will 
iamson's  table. 

"Sit  doAvn,"  John  said  cheerfully.  "Did  you  just  get 
in  to-day?" 

"Been  here  all  the  week,"  Joe  told  him. 

John  frowned.     "Not  in  this  hotel,  have  you?" 

"No,"  Joe  said.  "I  happened  to  be  down  the  street  a 
little  way,  and  I  ran  in  for  lunch." 

John  explained,  too.  "I  thought  I  would  have  bumped 
into  you,  that's  all,  if  you  had  been  staying  here.  I've 
been  here  three  or  four  days  myself.  Just  been  seeing  my 
daughter  off  to  Europe." 

"Did  your  wife  go  with  her?"  Joe  asked.  He  had 
spoken  out  of  a  dry  throat,  and  the  words  reverberated 
harshly  in  his  own  ears,  but  apparently  the  question 
sounded  casual  enough  to  Williamson. 

"No,"  he  answered.     "She's  at  home." 

"Have  you  moved  into  town  yet?"  Joe  inquired. 

John  told  him  they  were  still  out  in  Lake  Forest.  They 
hardly  ever  came  in  as  early  as  this.  Best  month  in 
the  year,  October  was.  No  time  like  it  for  horseback 
riding. 


436         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Joe  began  to  wonder,  fantastically,  if  John  was  trying 
to  torment  him  with  this  picture  of  Violet,  alone,  un 
guarded,  cantering  along  the  bridle  paths.  Why  had  John 
come  to  New  York  in  her  place  ?  Was  the  change  of  plan 
his  doing,  or  hers  ?  He  certainly  looked  damned  well  satis 
fied  with  himself,  munching  away  at  his  thick  English 
chop. 

"By  the  way,"  he  asked,  when  he  had  deliberately 
disposed  of  a  mouthful,  "what  luck  are  you  having  with 
your  raw  linen — marketing  it,  I  mean?  It  seems  to  have 
been  worrying  Henry  and  Miss  Mac  Arthur  quite  a  bit." 

"That's  what  I'm  down  here  on,"  said  Joe.  " — God, 
how  I  hate  this  town ! "  he  added. 

John  said  it  wasn't  such  a  bad  town  when  you  knew 
your  way  about  in  it. 

"Well,  I  guess  the  trouble  with  me  must  be  that  I 
don't  know  my  way  about,"  Joe  admitted.  "I've  been 
getting  an  idea  the  last  day  or  two  that  these  different 
people  I've  been  talking  to  are  all  in  cahoots." 

John  stared  at  him.  ' '  Good  God,  man ! "  he  said.  ' '  Of 
course  they  are.  Most  of  the  industries  that  are  adminis 
tered  from  New  York  are  pretty  well  tied  together  inside 
themselves.  But  the  textiles !  Good  lord ! ' ' 

"Well,  I  don't  know  anything  about  that,"  Joe  grum 
bled.  "That's  out  of  my  beat,  I  guess.  It  looked  like  a 
perfectly  straight  merchandising  proposition  to  me.  I 
had  something  good  that  they  wanted.  But  this  inside 
stuff  .  .  .  Look  here,  Williamson,  I  don't  see  why  this 
shouldn't  be  put  up  to  you.  Why  don't  you  stay  on  for 
two  or  three  days — and  earn  your  dividends?"  He  man 
aged  to  throw  in  a  smile  with  this,  but  it  didn't  take  off 
much  of  the  edge  of  his  words.  "You  can  play  this  pussy 
foot  game.  You  know  all  the  inside  stuff." 

"I'm  afraid  I  can't  take  it  on,"  John  said.  "I've  got 
to  be  home  Monday  morning  for  an  important  meeting." 

The  lightness  combined  with  the  finality  of  his  tone 
stung  Joe  to  a  flare  of  temper.  "Damn  it,  Williamson," 
he  said,  leaning  suddenly  forward,  half  across  the  table, 


ROMANCE  437 

"this  is  serious.  We've  got  thirty  million  pounds  of  that 
stuff  coming  in  that  we've  got  to  buy  at  an  agreed  price. 
It's  beginning  to  come  in  now.  We've  got  to  sell  it  or 
we're  swamped." 

John  moved  his  chair  a  few  inches  back  from  the  table, 
and  leaned  back  in  it.  "Do  you  mean  to  say,"  he  asked 
quietly,  "that  you've  committed  yourself  as  deep  as  that, 
without  having  made  any  arrangement  whatever  in  ad 
vance  for  turning  the  stuff  over  or  for  carrying  it? 
You're  in  a  very  serious  position,  if  that's  the  case." 

"You've  known  that  that  was  the  case  from  the  begin 
ning."  Joe  was  as  quiet  now  as  John,  and  very  alert.  "You 
made  no  criticism  of  that  plan  at  the  April  meeting." 

' '  I  certainly  assumed  that  your  program  involved  taking 
care  of  your  commitments,"  John  assured  him  steadily. 
After  a  moment,  he  went  on.  "Times  have  changed  a 
lot  since  April.  That  was  the  end  of  a  boom.  This  thing 
that's  on  us  now  is  the  beginning  of  a  panic,  I  think. 
That's  the  general  expectation  here  in  New  York,  any 
how.  I  very  much  doubt  if  you  can  sell  that  flax  here 
before  the  first  of  the  year — and  not  then  unless  times 
change  for  the  better." 

"Well,  if  you  are  right  about  that,"  Joe  said,  after  a 
thoughtful  silence,  "why,  it  takes  us  over  into  your  de 
partment.  ' ' 

"My  department?" 

"I  mean  we'll  have  to  be  carried.  We'll  have  to  bor 
row  money.  A  devil  of  a  lot  of  money,  too." 

' '  I  don 't  think  it 's  a  banking  proposition,  if  that 's  what 
you  mean.  The  stuff  is  not  collateral,  if  you  can 't  sell  it. ' ' 

"Whatever  you  want  to  call  it,  it's  up  to  you. — It's  up 
to  your  crowd,  I  mean.  I  have  carried  my  end  of  the 
load.  I've  made  thirty  million  pounds  of  raw  linen  out 
of  stuff  that  farmers  were  burning  in  the  fields.  There 
it  is.  It's  good  useful  stuff.  It's  got  value.  There's  no 
argument  about  that.  And  now,  I  say  it's  your  turn. 
That's  plain  enough,  isn't  it? — Hell!  We're  all  in  the 
same  boat." 


438         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"If  that's  your  position,"  John  answered  mildly,  "of 
course  we'll  have  to  take  some  action  on  it.  It's  much  too 
important  a  matter  for  me  to  deal  with  offhand.  I'll  have 
to  talk  it  over  with  Crawford  and  Corbett.  But  you  are 
quite  right;  it  ought  to  be  done  soon.  "We'll  talk  it  over 
and  let  you  know — say  "Wednesday  afternoon.  Come  up 
to  my  office  then — oh,  about  four  o'clock — and  we'll  have 
something  in  the  way  of  a  program  to  offer.  I've  got  to 
run  along.  I'm  taking  the  Century  this  afternoon.  You 
aren't  taking  that  train,  are  you?" 

Joe  shook  his  head.  "Waiting  over  till  Monday,  I 
think,"  he  said.  "All  right.  Wednesday  afternoon  at 
four,  then." 

13 

Joe  went  back  to  his  hotel,  a  modest  little  one  in  the 
upper  Twenties,  withdrew  to  his  own  room,  where  already 
he  had  passed  the  morning,  drank  the  whisky  he  needed, 
telegraphed  his  address  to  Jennie  MacArthur  and  said  she 
could  look  for  him  Tuesday,  and  then  spent  most  of  the 
afternoon  writing  a  letter  to  Violet.  The  intention — or 
better,  the  necessity — of  doing  this,  had  imbedded  itself 
in  his  mind  early  in  the  course  of  his  talk  with  John,  and 
the  ultimate  turn  this  talk  had  taken  had  in  no  way 
shunted  him  off. 

Williamson's  complacent,  superior  ways  had  exasper 
ated  Joe ;  so  had  his  hollow  disclaimer  of  responsibility  for 
the  financial  predicament  in  which  the  company  seemed 
likely  to  find  itself,  and  his  professional  banker's  manner 
of  saying  he  would  discuss  this  serious  situation  with  his 
friends  and  let  Joe  know — Wednesday  at  four  o'clock — 
what  they  thought  about  it.  But  none  of  this  had  sunk  into 
him  very  deep.  He  had  caught  nothing  sinister  in  John's 
use  of  the  pronoun  you  instead  of  we.  He  had  seen  no 
commenting  flicker  in  John 's  eye,  upon  his  ' '  Hell !  We  're 
all  in  the  same  boat."  He  was  still  angrier  with  him  for 
having  come  to  New  York  in  his  wife's  stead  than  for 
anything  else  John  had  done  or  might  be  planning  to  do. 

Writing  to  her  was  the  only  balm  he  could  apply  to  the 


ROMANCE 

burning  pain  of  this  disappointment.  The  letter  began 
stiffly — it  was  the  first  love-letter  he  had  ever  written  to 
Violet,  or  to  any  woman  for  that  matter — but  after  the 
first  few  sentences  he  ceased  to  be  conscious  of  it  as  a 
thing  that  must  go  through  the  post-office  in  an  envelope, 
to  be  read  at  Lake  Forest  on  Monday  morning  along  with 
the  rest  of  Violet's  mail.  It  became  a  simple  unmedi- 
tated  release  of  a  coiled  spring  of  emotions  which  had  been 
wound  up  by  waiting  past  the  breaking  point.  He  re 
proached  her  with  having  spoiled  his  plan  by  not  coming 
to  New  York,  and  then  reproached  himself  with  having, 
perhaps,  spoiled  hers  by  not  having  come  to  Chicago.  Had 
it  been  to  wait  for  him  there  that  she  had  sent  her  hus 
band  off  with  Dorothy?  He  told  her  crudely  how  he 
wanted  her,  and  how  unbearably  too  hard  the  waiting  had 
become.  Pie  didn't  want  her  by  crumbs  and  bits,  John 
Williamson's  leavings,  even  though  what  John  took  were 
nothing  that  a  man — a  real  man,  not  a  fatted  ox — would 
want.  He  might  come  to  Chicago  early  in  the  week,  or 
he  might  not,  but  in  no  case  would  he  come  to  her  until 
she  sent  for  him.  She  must  know  her  mind  by  now  .  .  . 

There  were  sheets  and  sheets  of  this. 

The  utter  recklessness  of  despatching  a  missive  of  this 
sort  to  a  woman  who  was  living  upon  any  sort  of  terms 
with  her  husband  was  apparent  enough  to  him,  but  it  suited 
his  mood.  He  gathered  the  scrawled  and  blotted  sheets 
into  an  envelope,  addressed  and  stamped  it,  took  it  out, 
and  dropped  it  down  the  chute  by  the  elevator.  Then  he 
came  back  into  his  room,  lay  down  on  the  bed,  dressed  as 
he  was,  and  almost  at  once  fell  deeply  asleep. 

He  was  awakened  several  hours  later  by  a  pounding  on 
his  door,  and  when  he  opened  it  and  angrily  demanded 
what  the  devil  the  row  was  about,  he  was  told  by  an  ob 
viously  relieved  bellboy  that  Chicago  was  trying  to  get  him 
on  the  telephone.  They  had  rung  his  bell  several  times 
without  rousing  him.  He  was  still  in  a  half  stupefied  con 
dition  when  he  went  to  the  telephone.  He  made  out  that 
it  was  Jennie  MacArthur  who  was  calling  him.  She  had 


440         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

been  trying  to  get  him,  she  said,  ever  since  receiving  his 
telegram  late  that  afternoon.  The  wire  was  clear  enough, 
but  he  had  trouble  making  out  what  she  wanted.  She 
was  talking  about  some  stock.  Had  he  been  selling  any? 

' '  Stock  in  what  ? "  he  asked. 

"Stock  in  the  Greer  Company,  Joe,"  she  told  him. 
' '  Have  you  been  selling  any  of  yours  ? ' ' 

He  told  her  she  must  be  crazy  to  ask  him  a  thing  like 
that.  Of  course  he  hadn't.  What  had  put  such  an  idea 
into  her  head? 

"Well,  there's  a  lot  of  it  for  sale,"  she  told  him.  "Up 
in  Fargo  and  other  places.  There 's  a  lot  of  it  sold  already, 
I  guess.  It's  the  other  crowd  that's  selling  it,  then." 

He  asked  her,  angrily,  what  other  crowd  she  meant. 

"I'll  write  you  all  I  know  about  it  to-night,"  she  told 
him,  in  a  rather  odd-sounding  voice.  "I'll  send  it  special 
delivery  so  you'll  get  it  the  first  thing  Monday  morning." 
He  told  her  this  would  be  all  right,  he  guessed,  and  at  that 
she  hung  up.  He  undressed  and  went  back  to  bed. 

His  memory  of  this  incident  when  he  awakened  Sunday 
morning  was,  oddly  enough,  perfectly  clear.  And  of 
course,  now  that  his  mind  was  working  again,  the  infer 
ence  from  what  she  had  told  him  was  clear,  too.  For  a 
long  time  he  lay  contemplating  it — it  and  other  matters, 
too,  in  a  sort  of  crystalline  detachment. 

Williamson  and  Corbett  and  Crawford  had  sold  out — 
stood  from  under.  They  had  sold  their  stock  right  up 
there  in  the  flax  country,  too.  Under  his  own  nose. 
Where  belief  in  the  company's  great  future  ran  highest, 
and  where  they  could  get  the  best  price.  They  covered 
their  tracks  cleverly,  too,  never  to  have  attracted  his  eye. 
It  was  queer  that  they  should  have  been  able  to  do  that 
without  ever  giving  him  a  hint  to  put  him  on  his  guard. 

But  why  had  they  done  it?  Simply  because  they  fore 
saw  bad  times,  and  they  wanted  to  convert  a  dubious 
chance  of  millions  into  a  sure  recovery  of  their  investment  ? 

Joe  didn't  think  it  likely.  They  were  expecting  some 
thing  better  than  that. 


ROMANCE  441 

They  were  playing  him  for  a  fool.  "Well,  he  was  one. 
He  had  been  quite  unaccountably  a  fool — for  months, 
blindly  unaware  of  what  was  going  on  about  him.  Will 
iamson  had  started  back  to  Chicago  under  the  satisfied 
conviction  that  he  had  been  a  fool.  "  It 's  your  turn  now, ' ' 
Joe  had  said  to  him.  Well,  that  was  what  they  thought. 
That  was  what  they  had  been  waiting  for.  They'd  be 
talking  it  over  this  Sunday  afternoon — the  three  of  them. 
Down  in  Williamson's  gun-room,  like  enough.  Smiling 
over  the  simplicity  of  his  turning  to  them — to  them — for 
help. 

He  didn't  waste  much  time  trying  to  forecast  the  terms 
of  the  offer  they  would  have  ready  for  him  Wednesday 
afternoon.  The  broad  outline  of  the  situation  was  plain 
enough.  In  default  of  selling  his  flax,  he  would  have  to 
borrow  the  money  to  pay  for  it,  and  as  the  price  of  find 
ing  the  money  for  him,  they  would  exact  their  pound  of 
flesh ;  namely,  his  share  in  the  enterprise  which  his  imagi- 
ination  had  conceived  and  his  energy  made  real.  What 
particular  form  of  hocus  pocus  under  the  polite  name  of 
reorganization  they  resorted  to,  didn't  matter. 

Well  he  was  broad  awake  now.  He  knew  exactly  the 
task  that  lay  before  him.  He  would  have  to  market  his 
flax,  or  he  would  have  to  find  the  money  to  carry  it,  not 
only  without  their  help,  but  against  their  relentless  op 
position.  How  long,  he  wondered,  had  they  been  opposing 
him?  How  much  of  the  bland  indifference  he  had  been 
chafing  at  during  the  past  week  had  been  their  doing? 
That,  like  enough,  had  been  Williamson's  business  in 
New  York.  And  Joe,  like  a  gull,  had  sat  there  at  the 
lunch  table  yesterday,  babbling  of  his  troubles. 

This  was  the  thing  that  worried  him — his  own  fatuous 
heedlessness.  He  had  understood  these  fellows  well 
enough  at  the  beginning;  taken  his  precautions  against 
them.  During  these  past  months  he  had  been  like  a  man 
drugged.  Never  mind  that;  he  was  awake  now. 

Perhaps  too  late — but  perhaps  not.  Certainly  he  would 
need  all  his  wits  to  meet  this  next  week.  No  good  wasting 


442         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

time  going  to  Chicago  to  listen  to  the  terms  of  the  bar 
gain  they  'd  propose  to  him.  He  'd  tell  Jennie  to  go  to  the 
meeting.  Tell  her,  too,  to  keep  them  in  the  dark  as  to 
where  he  was  and  what  he  was  doing.  She  could  play  that 
part  of  the  game  all  right.  She  saw  things  pretty  straight, 
Jennie  did.  In  a  sort  of  way,  she  had  seen  this  coming. 
It  must  have  been  in  her  mind  when  she  came  all  the 
way  to  Fargo  to  talk  to  him.  Damn  it,  why  didn't  she 
talk  out?  Make  him  see  it.  Her  manner  had  struck  him 
as  queer  on  that  visit ;  as  if  she  was  worried  about  him.  He 
wondered  how  she  had  discovered  that  the  other  crowd 
were  selling  out.  It  was  queer  she  hadn't  mentioned  it 
last  night  when  she  talked  to  him,  instead  of  saying  she'd 
write,  and  hanging  up  in  that  sudden  way. 

The  semi-somnolent,  luminous,  disembodied  period  came 
to  an  end  when  he  got  out  of  bed.  He  wanted  a  drink. 
That  was  the  first  thing.  He  went  over  to  the  bag  where 
he  kept  his  bottle,  but  it  wasn't  there.  Then  he  remem 
bered,  and  turned  back  to  the  desk  where  he  had  sat 
writing  so  long.  That  was  yesterday  afternoon.  There 
stood  the  bottle,  but  it  was  empty.  Queer!  It  had  been 
practically  full  when  he  had  opened  it  on  coming  in  from 
his  lunch  with  Williamson,  and  he  hadn't  been  out  of  the 
room  except  to  walk  down  the  corridor  to  mail  that  letter 
to  Violet. 

The  contents  of  that  letter,  forgotten  until  now,  began 
coming  back  into  his  mind  as  he  stood  staring  at  the  dis 
ordered  desk  and  the  empty  whisky  bottle.  He  couldn't 
remember  consecutively  what  he  had  said,  but  phrases  and 
fragments  that  came  back  into  his  mind  were  unbelievable 
— appalling.  He  did  remember  the  mere  physical  bulk  of 
the  thing  as  he  had  hefted  it  in  his  hand  on  his  way  to  the 
mail  chute. 

He  had  been  drunk  when  he  wrote  that  letter.  No  get 
ting  away  from  that.  He  had  been  drunk,  too,  when  Jen 
nie  telephoned — and  she  had  known  it.  That  was  why  her 
voice  had  changed  in  that  strange  way,  and  why  she  had 
hung  up  with  that  mere  promise  to  write.  He  had  got 


ROMANCE  443 

drunk  without  meaning  to,  and  without  recognizing  hia 
condition  when  he  was  in  it.  That  letter  to  Violet !  What 
could  he  do  about  it?  Telegraph  her  to  return  it  un* 
opened,  or  to  destroy  it  unread?  He  looked  at  his  watch. 
Eleven  o'clock — ten  in  Chicago.  It  was  too  late  to  risk 
the  comparative  publicity  of  a  telegram.  Williamson  him 
self  would  be  home  before  it  arrived,  and  it  would  as 
likely  as  not  fall  into  his  hands.  Then  the  fat  would  be 
in  the  fire. — He  needed  a  drink.  That  was  all  that  was  the 
matter  with  him.  He  would  be  able  to  think  after  he  had 
had  a  drink. 

He  was  on  the  way  to  the  bell  to  summon  the  boy  who 
provided  him  with  liquor,  when  he  stopped  short,  turned 
back,  and  lay  down  again  upon  the  bed.  He  was  clammy 
with  sweat.  His  whole  body  was  crying  out  for  the  drink 
he  wanted.  But  the  thing  that  frightened  him  was  the 
realization,  brought  home  at  last,  that  this  was  what  had 
been  the  matter  with  him  for  months.  In  a  way,  he  had 
known  it  all  along.  His  shame  over  the  habit  gave  him 
away;  his  careful  concealment  from  his  associates  of  the 
amount  of  whisky  it  took  to  see  him  through  the  day. 

He  got  up  and  took  the  empty  bottle  and  the  glass  into 
the  bathroom,  washed  them  out  thoroughly,  and  then 
washed  his  hands.  The  only  way  to  quit  was  to  quit. 

There  had  been  nothing  in  Joe's  experience  that  was 
comparable  with  the  tortures  of  the  ensuing  week,  unless 
it  were  the  unreckoned  period  of  time  when  he  had 
wandered,  starved  and  consumed  by  fever,  alone  in  the 
Amazon  jungle,  a  nightmare  that  had  come  to  its  climax 
when  he  had  torn  aside  the  curtain  of  thatch  which  hung 
over  one  gable  end  of  a  community  hut  and  staggered 
within,  expecting  to  be  transfixed  upon  a  native  spear. 

He  was  starving  now,  for  food  was  something  he  could 
hardly  bring  himself  to  touch;  he  was  consumed  by  what 
seemed  like  thirst,  except  that  no  drink  he  would  take 
could  satisfy  it;  he  was  dragged  down  by  a  heavy  lassi 
tude  ;  his  nervous  irritability  was  that  of  a  man  excoriated ; 
he  was  utterly  and  terribly  alone.  Worst  of  all — and  this 


444         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

was  a  thing  that  had  no  parallel  in  his  fight  with  the 
jungle — was  the  obsession  that  one  drink,  even  a  small 
drink,  of  whisky  would  make  him  instantly  himself  again. 
He  asserted  to  himself  that  this  was  a  lie ;  that  at  the  worst 
he  was  a  better  man  than  the  muzzy-witted  fool  he  had 
been  for  the  past  six  months ;  but  this  was  an  assertion  that 
he  had  constantly  to  make  anew. 

The  only  thing  that  supported  him  was  the  other  fight 
he  was  engaged  in,  the  fight  to  keep  himself  and  the  enter 
prise  which  he  had  made  a  part  of  himself  out  of  the 
waiting  clutches  of  John  "Williamson  and  his  friends. 

Jennie's  letter  when  it  came  on  Monday  morning  made 
it  clear  that  they  must  have  been  waiting  and  ready  for 
a  good  while.  It  was  an  inquiry  from  the  Blue  Sky  Com 
mission  in  one  of  the  flax-growing  states  that  had  revealed 
to  her  what  had  happened.  Stock  in  the  Greer  Company 
was  being  so  extensively  traded  in  that  the  status  of  the 
company  was  a  matter  of  official  concern.  There  was 
no  doubt  in  Jennie's  mind,  nor  in  Joe's  that  the  other 
crowd  were  completely  unloaded. 

Joe  got  her  at  once  on  the  telephone  and  told  her  that 
he  was  going  to  keep  on  trying  to  market  the  flax  in  New 
York.  He  was  going  after  a  new  lot  of  people.  There 
was  no  use  fooling  with  the  old  bunch  any  more,  who  were 
no  doubt  sewed  up  by  Williamson.  He  wasn't  going  to 
waste  time,  either,  going  to  Chicago  to  hear  what  the 
banker  and  his  associates  had  to  say.  Jennie  should  go 
to  the  meeting  and  receive  their  terms,  and  transmit  them 
to  him.  Also  she  was  to  avoid  saying  anything  about  his 
plans  or  present  whereabouts.  He  ended  the  conversa 
tion  by  telling  her  that  she  wasn  't  to  feel  discouraged.  He 
believed  he  was  going  to  win  out  yet. 

It  surprised  and  encouraged  him  that  he  could  com 
mand  so  cheerful  and  natural  a  tone.  It  sounded  all  right 
to  her,  evidently — and  her  relief  at  it  was  plain  to  him. 
Yet  it  seemed  to  him  that  his  own  voice  was  that  of  another 
man.  He  himself,  if  he  could  have  spoken,  would  only 
have  cried  out  in  torment.  This  strange  sense  of  duality 


ROMANCE  445 

persisted  throughout  the  week.  He  himself  was  there,  but' 
he  heard  the  other  man  presenting  his  case.  Presenting 
it  well,  lucidly,  persuasively,  while  he,  Joe  Greer,  was 
hardly  capable  of  consecutive  thought. 

He  had  begun,  as  he  told  Jennie  he  meant  to  do,  with  a 
new  crowd,  none  of  them  as  big  as  the  men  in  the  inner; 
ring;  outsiders,  but  capable  of  being  welded,  he  thought, 
into  a  ring  of  their  own.  He  worked  upon  them  singly. 
He  drew  them  into  little  groups,  and  after  a  while  felt 
them  coming  his  way.  The  evidences — straws  he  would 
not  have  been  capable  of  perceiving  a  week  ago — were 
pointing  toward  success. 

But  on  Friday,  when  he  had  talked  to  a  dozen  of  them 
together  at  a  prearranged  lunch,  this  reawakened  sensi 
tiveness  of  his  told  him  the  tide  had  turned  against  him. 
He  tried  to  shout  this  instinct  down,  tried  to  attribute  it 
to  his  own  exhausted  condition — but  it  would  not  do.  He 
worked  with  them  until  four  o'clock  that  afternoon,  but 
when  they  left  him  with  friendliest  professions  of  interest 
and  promises  of  further  consideration,  he  knew  he  was 
beaten. 

He  went  back  to  the  hotel,  and  there  found  Jennie's 
letter  containing  in  full  the  terms  offered  by  Williamson, 
Corbett  and  Crawford.  The  mental  effort  involved  in 
reading  the  letter  was  an  agony  in  itself  (one  drink  now 
— one  drink,  and  it  would  all  be  easy)  and  he  spent  most  of 
the  evening  mastering  the  details  of  it.  In  the  broad  out 
line,  however,  it  was  simple  enough.  The  first  move  had 
been  on  Monday  morning  when  the  three  of  them  formally 
tendered  their  resignations  as  directors  in  the  Greer  Com 
pany,  the  reason  being  offered  in  each  case  that  they 
were  no  longer  stockholders  in  the  company.  They  now 
proposed  to  organize  a  new  corporation  which  would  en 
ter  into  a  five-year  contract  with  the  Greer  Company  to 
buy  the  entire  output  of  raw  flax  which  the  Greer  Com 
pany  was  permitted  to  buy  from  the  subsidiaries,  at  the 
price  which  the  Greer  Company  had  paid  the  subsidiaries 
plus  a  broker's  commission  of  one-eighth  of  one  per  cent. 


446         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

The  Greer  Company  was  given  thirty  days  in  which  to 
accept  this  offer. 

Joe  grinned  savagely  over  the  neatness  of  the  thing.  He 
was  to  be  left  undisturbed  in  control  of  the  Greer  Company. 
The  Greer  Company  was  to  be  saved  from  bankruptcy,  al 
lowed  to  collect  its  meager  royalties  if  it  could,  and  a 
broker 's  commission  of  one-eighth  of  one  per  cent,  upon  its 
sales.  The  subsidiaries,  too,  would  be  paid  the  letter  of 
their  bond.  They'd  get  their  manufacturer's  profit — 
twenty  per  cent,  over  the  cost  of  material  and  labor  for 
processing  the  flax.  In  a  word,  they  and  the  Greer  Com 
pany  were  to  be  left  holding  the  bag.  All  the  real  pro 
fits  would  go  to  the  new  corporation. 

And  yet,  there  was  nothing,  so  far  as  Joe  could  see,  il 
legal  or  even  unethical  about  the  proposal.  Here  was  a 
company  rescued  from  impending  bankruptcy;  all  its 
technical  obligations  met;  its  continued  functioning  as 
sured.  As  Joe  had  once  said  to  Jennie,  having  the  right 
on  their  side  was  one  of  the  best  things  those  fellows  did. 
But  the  right  was  more  profitable  to  them  than  any  vul 
gar  wrecking  operation  could  be — by  just  the  subsidiaries, 
one-half  share  in  the  profit  of  merchandising  the  flax ! 

Well,  they  hadn't  got  it  yet.  He  still  had  thirty  days 
in  which  to  keep  on  trying  to  find  either  a  more  favorable 
market  for  the  flax,  or  credit  that  would  enable  him  to 
carry  it.  He  wasn't  really  angry  until  the  following 
morning  when  he  received  an  astonishing  note  from 
Williamson,  forwarded  by  Jennie  from  his  office. 

The  offer  they  had  made  to  the  Greer  Company  was 
the  best,  John  said,  that  they  felt  was  justified  in  view 
of  the  present  bad  times  and  uncertain  market  conditions. 
He  did  not,  however,  wish  to  give  Greer  personally  any 
justification  for  feeling  that  he  was  being  squeezed  out  in 
the  new  arrangement.  Any  amount,  therefore,  up  to  three 
million  dollars,  that  Greer  might  wish  to  invest  in  the 
new  corporation  would  be  accorded  its  due  share  in  the 
issuance  of  the  stock.  He  didn't  know,  he  said,  whether 
Joe's  connection  with  the  old  company  would  embarrass 


ROMANCE  447 

him  in  going  into  the  new  or  not,  but  this,  at  any  rate,  was 
his  own  affair.  \ 

He  did  know,  of  course,  damn  well,  that  Joe  could  not 
participate  in  any  of  the  profits  derived  from  a  contract 
like  that  without  being  under  the  gravest  imputation  of 
bad  faith ;  and  he  also  suspected  that  John  knew  he  hadn  't 
any  money  to  spare.  The  smugness  of  this  gesture  of  fair, 
play  enraged  him,  and  he  cursed  the  banker  steadily  for 
half  an  hour.  Then  he  went  out  to  find  Gordon  Snell,  the 
man  whom  New  York  insisted  upon  overwhelming  with 
easy  money. 

Snell  wasn't  the  sort  of  New  Yorker  who  goes  out  of 
town  for  week-ends.  Saturday  night  was  for  him  the 
highest  and  most  brilliantly  illuminated  spot  in  the  week. 
Joe  found  him,  in  his  office,  somewhat  less  expansive  than 
he  had  been  over  the  lunch  table ;  and  when  he  had  learned 
the  import  of  his  visitor's  call,  distinctly  patronizing. 
However,  he  was  cordial  enough,  and  professed  himself 
willing  to  hear  Joe's  story — only  not  to-day.  Not  until 
next  week  some  time.  Ah,  Monday  would  be  all  right — 
Monday  or  Tuesday.  Joe  had  better  call  him  up  on  Mon 
day.  Not  too  early,  though.  A  man  could  never  tell 
down  here  in  New  York  where  he  was  going  to  be  or  what 
sort  of  head  he  would  have  Monday  morning. 

Eight  now,  he  had  to  run  off — had  a  date  for  lunch.  He 
had  another  date  for  to-night,  too,  but  this  wasn't  so 
strictly  private  an  affair.  He  would  like  to  have  Joe 
come  along.  Yes,  by  Heck,  Joe  had  got  to  come  along! 
No  two  ways  about  it.  It  was  going  to  be  a  nice  little 
party.  They'd  have  dinner  together  at  the  Astor,  and 
look  in  at  one  of  the  shows  to  pass  the  time  until  the  party 
proper  was  supposed  to  begin.  Up  in  one  of  the  big  new 
studio  buildings  in  the  west  Fifties,  it  was  to  be.  Only 
no  business.  Joe  had  got  to  give  his  solemn  word  for 
that.  Business,  Snell 's  experience  had  taught  him,  was 
one  thing,  and  pleasure  was  another;  and  a  man  couldn't 
enjoy  getting  gently  illuminated  if  there  was  any  danger 
of  his  being  asked  to  sign  on  the  dotted  line  somewhere. 


448         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Joe  knew  this  sort  of  lack-wit  well  enough  to  perceive 
that  these  convivial  preliminaries  were  indispensable,  and 
it  put  him  for  a  moment  in  a  dilemma.  Then  he  said, 
"I  can't  get  drunk  any  more,  myself.  Had  to  go  on  the 
wagon.  But  I'm  good  for  the  dinner  and  the  show,  any 
how;  and  I  won't  talk  business." 

He  was  fairly  dragged  along  to  the  party,  too,  after 
ward,  and  had  of  course  an  agonizing  experience — only 
just  short  of  unbearable.  The  rest  of  the  crowd  were  get 
ting  drunk  as  fast  as  they  knew  how.  It  was  an  ironic 
reflection  that  once,  and  not  very  long  ago,  this  sort  of 
entertainment  had  been  a  favorite  recreation  of  his  own. 
He  endured  it  by  main  strength  until  about  two  o'clock 
Sunday  morning;  then,  reflecting  that  Snell  would  never 
be  able  to  remember  afterward  whether  he  had  left 
now  or  hours  later,  he  bade  an  unobtrusive  good  night  to 
his  host  and  slipped  away. 

He  was  nearer  discouraged  than  he  had  been  before.  It 
did  not  seem  likely  that  a  drunken  fool  like  this  could  be 
a  source  of  efficacious  help — and  yet  he  knew  of  no  other. 
Well,  there  was  no  good  thinking  any  more  about  Snell  till 
Monday  morning. 

When  he  went  to  the  desk  in  his  hotel  to  get  his  key,  they 
handed  him  a  telegram.  He  supposed  it  was  information 
from  Jennie  that  he'd  wired  for  as  to  the  amount  of  the 
drafts  that  had  come  in  against  bills  of  lading  on  flax  that 
had  already  been  shipped.  He  had  hardly  the  heart  to 
open  it. 

But  the  woman's  name  which  was  signed  to  it  was  not 
Jennie's.  It  read: — 

"Arriving  Pennsylvania  station  tomorrow  morning  nine 
forty-five  for  few  hours  only. 

Violet." 
14 

He  was  still  incredulous  when  he  saw  her  walking  toward 
him,  down  the  platform.  Frightened,  and  thrilled  at  the 
same  time,  with  a  sense  of  great  adventure,  as  he  could  see 
she  was,  she  had  once  more  the  look  of  a  schoolgirl  to  him. 


ROMANCE  449 

Not  merely  that;  she  looked  to  his  enraptured,  sleepless 
eyes  like  a  probationary  angel  come  down  to  change  the 
whole  face  of  the  world. 

Her  face  brightened  joyously  when  she  saw  him,  then 
in  an  instant  composed  itself  into  the  look  of  amicably  in 
different  recognition  appropriate  to  being  met  in  the  sta 
tion  by  a  man  whom  her  husband  might  have  requested  to 
look  after  his  wife. 

He  took  her  dressing-case  from  the  red-cap,  tipped  the 
boy,  and  said  to  her,  "YouVe  just  about  got  time  to  make 
the  othfr  train.  We'll  go  around  this  way." 

"With  a  demure  gleam  of  mischief  which  made  him  want 
to  kiss  her  where  she  stood,  she  accepted  this,  contentedly, 
as  a  maneuver  for  getting  away  at  once,  out  of  the  Chicago 
crowd  that  was  pouring  along  the  platform. 

"I  don't  care  where  we  go,"  she  said,  after  they  had 
changed  levels  and  were  walking  down  a  transverse  cor 
ridor,  "only  I  must  be  back  here  in  the  station  at  six 
o  'clock.  That 's  when  I  am  supposed  to  be  getting  in  from 
Chicago." 

"That'll  be  all  right,"  he  assured  her.  "I'll  get  you 
back  here  on  time.  You  can  leave  it  all  to  me."  For  an 
instant  the  sense  of  the  furtiveness  of  their  escapade  elated 
him.  He  gave  a  short  laugh,  slid  his  arm  inside  hers,  and 
pressed  it  against  his  body.  She  returned  the  pressure,  but 
at  once,  with  a  nervous  glance  around,  released  herself. 

"If  we're  going  where  we  can  really  be  alone  for  a 
while, ' '  she  said,  ' '  there 's  no  good  taking  chances  here. ' ' 

His  mood  changed.  "Oh,  damn  it!"  he  said.  "Yes,  I 
suppose  you're  right."  And  they  walked  on  in  silence. 

She  hesitated  a  moment  in  clear  surprise  when  she  found 
him  showing  a  pair  of  tickets  and  taking  her  through  the 
gate  to  one  of  the  Long  Island  railway  trains,  but  she 
asked  no  explanation,  and  he  made  none  until  they  were 
seated  in  an  almost  empty  coach. 

"This  is  a  little  branch  line,"  he  said.  "It  goes  down 
to  one  of  the  beaches  where  there 's  nobody  about,  this  time 
of  year.  I  found  it  when  I  was  wandering  around,  just 


450         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  fflS  DAUGHTER 

a  week  ago  to-day.  Had  it  all  to  myself,  including  a  little 
hotel  that  a  fat  man  is  keeping  open  because  he  hasn't 
anywhere  else  to  go.  We  can  get  lunch  there,  I  guess. — It 
was  only  last  Sunday  I  was  there,"  he  added,  ''but  it 
seems  like  the  longest  year  I've  ever  lived." 

She  had  stripped  off  one  of  her  gloves,  and  nestled  her 
bare  hand  into  his,  upon  the  seat  between  them.  At  this 
confession,  though  she  misunderstood  it,  she  darted  a 
glance  around,  and  perceived  that  there  was  no  one  else 
in  their  part  of  the  car — not  even  a  brakeman — she  raised 
his  hand  and  stroked  the  hairy  back  of  it  with  her  lips. 
"Poor  old  Joe!"  she  whispered. 

He  had  a  blissful  hour  before  they  left  the  train  at  the 
little  way-station  he  had  picked  out,  despite  the  rattle  of 
the  windows,  the  slamming  of  the  doors,  the  sudden  stops 
and  starts,  and  the  bawling  of  the  brakeman,  which  kept 
beating  a  dreadful  tattoo  upon  his  drawn  nerves.  It 
would  be  too  hard  to  talk,  she  said,  and  sitting  quietly  be 
side  him  like  this,  and  continuing  to  hold  his  hand,  she 
gave  him  a  respite  from  the  thoughts  that  had  been  surging 
through  his  brain,  turning  him  giddy,  elating  him  and 
terrifying  him  ever  since  he'd  read  that  telegram. 

She  was  looking  around  pretty  dubiously,  he  saw,  at  the 
surroundings  they  descended  into  from  the  train. 

"It's  awfully  bright,  isn't  it?"  she  said.  "I  hate  a 
glare  like  this,  especially  when  I've  just  spent  the  night  on 
the  train." 

"All  the  light  in  the  world  couldn't  hurt  your  looks," 
he  told  her.  But  she  turned  away  from  him  with  a  petu 
lant  laugh. 

"Where  are  we  going?"  she  asked.  "We've  got  to 
find  some  shade  somewhere." 

"I  don't  believe  there's  any  on  the  beach,"  he  said.  It 
had  been  his  idea  that  they  would  sit  there  side  by  side, 
with  nothing  but  the  Atlantic  Ocean  and  a  peppering  of 
Antilles  between  them  and  South  America.  "There's  a 
veranda  on  the  hotel  over  there,  though, ' '  he  added. 

She  cast  another   dubious  glance  at  the  shabby  little 


ROMANCE  451 

gable-roofed  building  his  gesture  had  pointed  out,  and 
for  a  moment  stood  still,  visibly  casting  about  for  an  al 
ternative.  Then  she  started  on,  he  following,  along  the 
rickety  sidewalk  that  led  to  the  inn.  There  were  drifts  of 
loose  sand  across  the  sidewalk,  and  over  these  she  walked 
gingerly. 

"I  hate  sand,  too,"  she  told  him,  but  not  unamiably, 
"when  I've  got  on  shoes  and  stockings  like  these." 

"I'm  afraid  there's  nothing  much  here  but  sand,"  he 
remarked,  apologetically.  Just  before  they  reached  the 
inn,  she  stopped  and  faced  him.  "Joe,"  she  asked,  "why 
did  you  bring  me  here?" 

He  was  taken  aback  for  an  answer;  couldn't  be  sure  he 
knew  what  she  meant.  "Why,"  he  said,  "I  was  trying 
to  think  of  some  quiet  open  sort  of  place  where  we  could 
talk  and  decide  what  we  were  going  to  do,  and  this  came 
into  my  head.  I'm  sorry  you  don't  like  it." 

"It's  all  right,"  she  asserted,  "only  it  looks  so  perfectly 
(disreputable. ' ' 

"I  don't  think  it's  that,"  Joe  said,  "but  it  does  look  as 
if  it  was  closed.  There  used  to  be  some  chairs  and  things 
standing  around  on  this  veranda. ' '  He  tried  the  door  and 
found  it  locked,  but  after  rattling  and  knocking  upon  it  for 
a  while,  they  heard  heavy  steps  within,  and  presently  the 
fat  proprietor  came  and  opened  it.  He  was  in  his  shirt, 
but  the  garment  was  clean  and  he  was  freshly  shaven. 

"Can  we  get  lunch  here?"  Joe  asked.  "There  are  just 
the  two  of  us." 

"Why,  the  hotel  is  rightly  closed,"  the  man  said,  "but 
I  guess  I  can  cook  you  up  a  lunch  if  you  don't  mind  taking 
sort  of  what  you  can  get." 

"Not  a  bit,"  Violet  assured  him  cordially,  somewhat  to 
Joe's  surprise.  "It's  very  nice  of  you  to  take  so  much 
trouble  for  us." 

Upon  that,  he  hospitably  invited  them  in  and  told  them 
to  make  themselves  right  at  home.  The  interior  made  a 
strong  contrast  with  the  outside  look  of  the  place.  It 
was  unpretentiously  but  agreeably  furnished,  and  it  was 


452         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

immaculately  neat.  There  was  a  wide  fireplace  flanked 
with  settles,  where  he  said  they  could  have  a  fire  whenever 
they  wanted  it.  He'd  have  lunch  ready  about  one,  if  that 
would  suit  them.  He  took  a  childlike  pleasure  in  Violet's 
approval  of  the  place,  which  she  warmly  expressed.  His 
daughter  had  fixed  it  up,  he  said,  and  she  was  the  one  who 
really  ran  it  during  the  season.  Now,  however,  she  was 
working  in  New  York,  and  her  hours  made  it  inconvenient 
for  her  to  commute  down  here.  He  was  just  staying 
around  to  sort  of  keep  the  place  from  blowing  away. 
"And  with  my  build,"  he  concluded  humorously,  "I'm 
pretty  good  for  that. ' ' 

"Willingly,  he  set  about  to  refurnish  the  veranda,  carry 
ing  out,  with  Joe's  help,  a  small  rattan  davenport,  two  or 
three  chairs,  cushions,  and  striped  cotton  blankets,  gay 
colored.  "Just  as  easy  to  make  it  a  bit  home-like,"  he 
explained,  when  Violet  had  protested  that  these  latter  ad 
ditions  were  superfluous. 

"It's  perfect,  Joe,"  Violet  said,  when  at  last  they  were 
ensconced  and  their  host,  with  visible  reluctance,  had  left 
them  to  themselves.  "And  that  fat  old  innocent,"  she 
added,  "is  the  nicest  thing  about  it.  No,  not  nicer  than 
you.  The  nicest  thing  about  the  place,  I  said.  I  suppose 
he  thinks  we're  a  couple  of  honeymooners. " 

He  leaned  against  the  rail,  devouring  her  with  burning 
eyes.  She  had  tucked  herself  up  in  a  corner  of  the  daven 
port,  taken  off  her  hat,  and  dropped  it,  negligently,  on  the 
floor  beside  her.  The  sense  of  the  incredible  perfection  of 
her,  in  form  and  texture,  in  the  exquisite  fineness  of  de 
tail,  oppressed  his  heart  with  a  strange  melancholy,  and 
stiffened  his  throat. 

"You  look  the  part,"  he  said. 

"You  don't,"  she  retorted,  returning  his  gaze.  "You 
look  horribly  tired — and  ill.  Oh,  don 't  sit  away  off  there. 
Come  here  where  I  can  feel  you.  Wait,  though.  It's 
horrid  to  have  to  do  it,  but  look  up  the  train  first,  Joe. 
See  how  long  we're  going  to  have.  I've  absolutely  got  to 
be  back  in  the  Pennsylvania  station  a  little  before  six." 


ROMANCE  453 

He  consulted  a  time  card  that  he  had  in  his  pocket. 
' '  That  means  leaving  at  four  fifteen,  to  be  sure  of  it. ' ' 

Her  eyes  filled  up  with  tears.  "And  it's  nearly  noon 
now,"  she  cried.  "Four  hours — and  I  thought  it  was  a 
whole  day." 

' '  Well,  never  mind.     We  won 't  waste  any  of  it. ' ' 

He  had  dropped  down  on  the  sofa  beside  her,  but  she 
wasn't  content  with  the  way  he  sat.  "You're  so  tired," 
she  protested.  "So  deadly  tired.  Can't  you  just  be 
happy,  and  relax  for  a  little  while?  Lean  down  on  me, 
like  this.  No,  you're  not  too  heavy — not  half  as  heavy 
as  I  thought  you'd  be. — Joe,  is  it  all  my  fault  you're  like 
this?" 

"It's  not  your  fault  at  all,"  he  told  her.  "And  it  isn't 
all  your  doing  either.  I've  had  a  hell  of  a  two  weeks — 
and  there  are  more  of  them  in  sight.  But  I  'm  through  the 
worst  of  it,  I  guess.  I  '11  come  out  right  side  up  in  the  end, 
anyhow.  It  isn't  the  first  fight  I 've  had,  by  a  good  many." 

She  said  dryly,  "I'd  like  to  see  John  got  the  better  of 
for  once.  Don't  you  let  him  beat  you,  Joe.  I'd  always 
think  it  was  my  fault." 

"John  Williamson?"  he  asked  slowly.  "Don't  worry 
about  him.  He  hasn't  got  me  yet." 

She  wanted  to  know,  over  a  little  laugh,  what  John  he 
thought  she  meant.  "I  believe  you're  going  to  sleep,"  she 
added.  "You're  so  tired.  Don't  try  to  talk.  Keep  still, 
like  this.  Isn't  it  ridiculous?  I'm  the  one  that's  sup 
posed  to  be  sick.  I  'm  packed  off  to  Doctor  Brown.  He 's 
got  a  place  out  here  on  Long  Island  for  nervous  wrecks, 
where  he  treats  good-for-nothing  women  like  me.  A  mix 
ture  of  Freud  and  Christian  Science  he  "gives  us.  It 
works  pretty  well,  too.  I've  been  to  him  once  or  twice  for 
insomnia. — Well,  I  had  it  all  right  after  I  got  that  letter  of 
yours,  Joe. ' ' 

Despite  her  effort  to  hold  him  where  he  was,  he  sat 
erect.  "You  must  have  hated  me  for  that,"  he  said. 

"Silly,  I  adored  you  for  it — but  it  frightened  me  out 
of  my  five  wits.  It  was  wild  to  take  a  chance  like  that, 


454         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Joe.  John  doesn't  read  my  letters,  and  he  doesn't  ask 
questions,  but  if  he  had  been  there  when  the  mail  came  in 
and  had  seen  the  thickness  of  that  envelope,  and  your 
handwriting  on  it,  he'd  have  had  a  whole  lot  to  think 
about.  That's  just  the  kind  of  chances  we  can't  take. 
But  I'm  glad  you  did  it  once.  I  never  knew  what  it  was 
before.  I  felt  as  if  I  had  to  go  to  you  then,  without 
waiting  a  minute.  And  of  course  it  got  worse  during  the 
week,  as  I  found  out  what  John  and  the  others  were  doing 
to  you.  Oh,  they  didn't  tell  me  anything,  but  I  caught 
bits  of  their  talk  now  and  then.  I  was  afraid  if  John  tried 
to  talk  to  me  about  it,  I'd  blow  up  and  give  everything 
away;  so  I  didn't  dare  talk  to  him  at  all.  Locked  myself 
up,  and  had  a  nervous  breakdown.  It  seemed  pretty  real 
at  the  time — even  to  me.  But  I  was  all  right  again  as 
soon  as  he  suggested  Doctor  Brown.  I  had  to  be,  or  he 
would  have  insisted  on  sending  somebody  down  with  me. 
He  suggested  Margaret  Craven,  as  it  was.  I  promised  to 
stay  with  Alice  Wentworth  instead  of  going  to  a  hotel, 
and  I  told  him  I'd  telegraph  her  what  train  to  meet  me  at. 
I  did — but  it  wasn't  the  one  I  was  on.  And  that's  how  I 
I  got  our  day. — It  isn't  much,  is  it,  for  all  that?  Four 
hours — and  already  they're  slipping  away." 

"They're  enough,  though,  if  we  don't  waste  them. — No, 
you've  got  me  about  half  hypnotized  now.  I  haven't  any 
grip  on  my  mind  when  you  hold  me  like  that.  We've  got 
to  talk  this  thing  through  somehow ;  find  out  where  we  are, 
and  what  we're  going  to  do." 

She  drew  a  long  sigh.  ""What's  the  use  spoiling  this, 
Joe  ?  That 's  all  we  should  do,  trying  to  talk.  It  '11  be  time 
enough  on  the  train,  when  we  go  back,  won't  it?  After 
all,  there  can't  be  very  much  to  say.  It's  so  heavenly 
still  here.  Put  your  head  down,  where  you  can  see  the 
clouds  that  make  those  big  purple  shadows. — Do  you  know 
What  I  wish?  I  wish  Mount  Vesuvius  was  right  behind 
us,  here ;  and  after  we  'd  been  here  a  long  time — as  long  as 
we  wanted,  it  would  all  at  once  smother  us  with  ashes,  the 
way  it  did  those  Pompeian  people." 


ROMANCE  455 

He  had  yielded  to  her  arms  again.  "If  that's  what  we 
wanted, ' '  he  said,  ' '  we  shouldn  't  have  to  depend  on  Mount 
Vesuvius.  It  can  be  managed  more  handily  than  that. 
But  it  '11  be  a  long  while  before  I  'm  ready  to  die,  even  like 
this.  There's  too  much  left  to  be  lived  through.  I'd  like 
to  sail  into  the  Bay  of  Naples  with  you,  for  one  thing,  and 
have  a  look  at  that  old  volcano. — Do  you  remember  some 
thing  you  said  the  first  time  we  talked  together,  about 
wishing  you  could  be  there  with  me  when  I  had  my  first 
look  at  all  that?  It's  going  to  work  out,  sometime,  you 
know.  I've  known  it,  in  a  way,  ever  since  you  said  it. — 
"We  could  do  it,  at  that.  To-morrow.  There's  a  Dutch 
boat  sailing  for  Lisbon. — Oh,  it's  all  right  to  laugh,  but  it's 
going  to  happen  some  day." 

"There  isn't  a  city  in  Europe,  Joe," — her  voice  was 
somber  enough  now — "where  we  wouldn't  be  running  into 
people  all  the  time  who  knew  me.  And  who'd  know  what 
I'd  done.  Oh,  it's  a  lovely  dream,  my  dear,  but  it  will 
never  come  true." 

Again,  and  this  time  bruskly,  he  disengaged  himself 
from  her  arm.  He  rose  giddily  to  his  feet,  pulled  up  a 
chair,  and  sat  down  on  it.  ' '  You  see, ' '  he  said,  ' '  we  can 't 
get  away  from  it.  It  keeps  coming  back.  We've  got  to 
talk  it  out;  decide  what  we're  going  to  do." 

"I  don't  want  to  talk!"  she  said  fiercely,  at  the  end  of 
a  tight  drawn  silence.  "Talking  won't  get  us  anywhere." 

"I  guess  you're  right  about  that,"  he  agreed.  "That's 
the  way  I  feel  about  it,  too.  It's  always  simplest  to  do  a 
thing  first  and  save  your  talking  till  afterward.  This  is 
what  we'll  do,  Violet.  There's  a  Chilean  liner  sailing  for 
Valparaiso,  Saturday.  That'll  give  us  time  to  get  our  pass 
ports  and  anything  we  need.  They  know  me  down  there, 
and  they'll  take  you  for  granted  as  my  wife  without  a 
question.  There's  nobody  who'd  think  of  asking  a 
question.  We'd  leave  all  this  clean  behind.  Start  fresh, 
both  of  us,  on  a  life  that  is  worth  living.  Something 
we've  never  had  a  chance  at.  I've  never  had  a  wife — 
I  haven't  even  a  legal  one,  now — and  you've  never  had  a 


456         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

husband,  either.  That's  God's  truth.  You  know  it,  your 
self;  found  it  out  at  last.  He'd  divorce  you  if  you  asked 
him  to,  and  then  we  could  make  it  all  square — go  anywhere 
we  liked — tell  anybody  to  go  to  hell.  And  in  the  mean 
time  ...  It's  better  than  mucking  around  here  in  this. 
There  won't  be  anything  hard  about  it,  either.  Not  after 
you've  once  said  you'll  do  it.  And  you  will.  It's  written 
down  in  the  books  that  you  will!" 

"That's  a  crazier  dream  than  the  other,  Joe,"  she  said 
uneasily.  "I  wish  you  wouldn't  talk  like  that." 

"There's  not  a  thing  in  it,"  he  contradicted  her,  "that 
isn't  plain  common  sense;"  and  he  went  on  for  a  while  to 
enlarge  upon  the  practicality  of  it.  He  had  a  thousand 
dollars  in  his  pocket,  and  ten  thousand  more  which  was 
almost  as  accessible.  He  'd  been  keeping  it  handy  for  years, 
on  the  off  chance  of  some  emergency  that  would  call  for  it. 
That  would  be  enough  to  give  him  a  start,  and  a  start  was 
all  he  ever  wanted,  anywhere.  Down  in  that  part  of  the 
world  opportunities  for  a  man  of  his  profession  were  thick 
as  dandelions.  They  went  to  seed  faster  than  you  could 
pick  them.  "  I  'd  never  ask  you  to  take  a  chance  with  hard 
ship,"  he  assured  her  earnestly.  "I  can  keep  you  as  safe 
from  the — meannesses  of  life  as  John  Williamson  can." 

Her  uncontrollable  restlessness  as  he  talked,  her  frantic 
attempts  to  turn  him  aside  from  the  theme,  served  only 
to  feed  his  elation.  It  was  against  herself  she  was  strug 
gling,  not  against  him.  He  abandoned  practical  consider 
ations  as  something  established,  and  began  painting  for 
her  the  romance  of  the  picture,  the  paradisaical  country, 
the  suavity  and  the  charm  of  life  and  manners. 

For  that  hour  he  was  fully  himself  again.  The  lassi 
tude  was  conquered,  the  tortured  nerves  in  tune,  the 
gnawing,  obsessing  need  of  alcohol  forgotten.  He  revealed 
the  thing  he  wanted  her  to  see,  not  in  tame  descriptive 
generalities,  but  in  flashes  of  concrete  reality,  fragments 
of  his  own  experience,  illuminative  sparks  of  the  most 
minute  detail.  He  fairly  gave  her  the  wine-dry  air  of 
that  mountain-guarded  country  to  breathe. 


ROMANCE  457 

It  was  she  now  who  resisted  his  arms,  but  he  won  her 
to  them  at  last  and  stilled  her  protests  in  them ;  quieted  her 
trembling. 

"After  all,"  he  said,  when  he  had  kissed  her — for  the 
first  time,  that  day,  "this  is  what  matters."  His  voice, 
harsh  as  it  was  with  passion,  subdued  itself  to  the  ear 
that  was  so  near  his  lips.  "You're  in  love  with  me. 
You've  found  out  what  it  means  at  last.  You  can  guess 
what  it  will  be  like.  I'm  in  love  with  you.  And  I  know 
what  it  will  mean.  I'm  not  a  green  boy,  guessing — nor  an 
ox  who  has  forgotten.  You  can't  go  back  now,  Violet!" 

She  did  not  return  his  kiss,  but  she  lay  unresisting,  ac 
quiescent,  in  his  embrace.  She  may  have  thought,  during 
these  wild,  heedless  minutes,  that  she  would  go  with  him. 
He  sensed  victory  in  the  air,  at  least.  But  when  they  heard 
the  inn-keeper  coming  heavily  toward  the  door  to  tell  them 
their  lunch  was  ready,  she  struggled  erect  like  one  startled 
out  of  a  dream. 

Before  their  host,  while  he  was  waiting  upon  them,  she 
amazed  Joe — though  it  was  a  faculty  of  hers  he  had  often 
wondered  at  before — by  the  perfection  with  which  she 
played  her  part.  She  ate  her  lunch  with  an  appearance  of 
normal  appetite,  where  he  could  hardly  choke  down  a 
mouthful.  She  talked  amusedly,  where  he  could  hardly 
find  monosyllables  to  respond,  about  small  items  in  their 
common  experience,  about  people  they  knew.  Despite  the 
fact  that  Joe  was  powerless  to  help,  she  carried  him  along 
with  her,  so  that  they  presented  to  the  fat  old  inn-keeper 
a  thoroughly  plausible  picture  of  a  pair  of  Chicagoans, 
not  too  recently  married,  enjoying  a  vacation  in  New  York, 
and  a  Sunday  in  the  country. 

The  only  indication  she  gave  to  Joe  of  anything  behind 
all  this  was  by  deliberately  delaying  the  old  man.  She 
was  trying,  Joe  thought,  to  prolong  her  respite.  But  when 
at  last  he  did  leave  them,  with  a  bell  to  ring  when  they 
should  be  ready  for  their  final  course,  she  turned  straight 
back  to  their  own  affair  and  in  an  even  voice  tore  his 
hopes  to  pieces. 


458         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

"It's  no  good,  Joe,"  she  said.  "It  will  never  happen 
— that  thing  you've  been  talking  about.  I  know  you  had 
spoken  about  it  before — about  the  time  coming  when  I'd 
be  ready  to  go  away  with  you. — Break  my  own  life  alto 
gether,  and  try  to  hold  on  by  yours.  I've  let  myself 
dream  sometimes  that  I  would,  but  it's  never  been  any 
thing  but  a  dream — never  can  be.  I  suppose  if  I  had  any 
real  courage — but  I  haven't,  Joe;  not  a  scrap." 

He  contradicted  her  roughly,  trying  to  put  a  conviction 
behind  the  words  that  was  not  there.  It  was  her  tone 
that  told  him  the  truth,  not  the  things  she  had  been  saying. 

"Why,"  she  reminded  him,  with  a  wry  smile,  "I've 
never  even  had  the  sand  to  tell  John  that  you  hadn't — 
taken  advantage  of  me  in  the  car  that  day — not  so  that 
he  'd  have  to  believe  it.  I  'm  fond  of  John,  too, ' '  she  added. 
' '  I  wouldn  't  hurt  him  like  that  for  anything  in  the  world. ' y 

He  laughed,  and  then  was  amazed  to  see  that  tears  had 
sprung  into  her  eyes.  "I  didn't  mean  to  hurt  you,"  he 
said  apologetically,  "only  it  seems  to  me  that  in  twenty 
years  he  has  had  his  chance." 

"I  know,"  she  conceded.  "I  am  in  love  with  you,  and 
I  'm  not  with  him — never  was,  I  guess.  All  the  same,  love 
isn  't  the  only  thing  in  the  world — not  for  me. ' '  Her  voice 
ran  thin,  betraying  an  almost  hysterical  note.  "Why,  down 
in  that  country — Valparaiso,  wherever  it  is — those  people 
would  all  be  foreigners,  talking  a  language  I  don 't  know  a 
word  of.  I  wouldn't  have  anybody  but  you.  I  want 
people  around  that  like  me.  Joe,  it  isn't  thinkable;  that's 
all.  It's  simply  frantic  to  talk  about  asking  John  ta 
divorce  me.  John !  Then  there 's  Dorothy,  too. — I  didn  't 
want  you  to  talk  about  it.  I  knew  you'd  spoil  this  one 
little  day  of  ours  if  you  did." 

"What  did  you  want  this  day  for?"  Joe  asked. 

She  dried  her  eyes,  and  echoed  his  words  with  a  stare  and 
a  slow  burning  blush. 

"I  wanted  to  see  you,"  she  stammered.  "I  knew  you 
were  unhappy,  and  I  was  miserable,  and  I  thought  ..." 
She  broke  off  there,  and  after  a  moment's  silence  finished 


ROMANCE  459 

with  a  flash  of  anger,  "There's  something  beastly  about 
you  sometimes,  Joe." 

"I  guess  that's  true  of  most  of  us,"  he  said  dully,  "but 
I  didn't  mean  to  be  beastly  then." 

Her  response  to  his  humility  was  another  lightning 
change  of  mood.  Her  hand  darted  out  across  the  table 
and  rested  upon  his.  "I'm  sorry,  Joe,"  she  said.  "I 
wish  we  could  be  a  little  happy."  Then  she  rang  the 
bell.  "We  may  as  well  have  the  rest  of  our  lunch,  any 
how,"  she  added. 

She  told  their  old  host,  gaily,  how  good  it  had  been ;  and 
he,  basking  in  her  favor,  made  an  endless  business  of  set 
ting  out  the  new  course.  "I  could  give  you  better  meals 
than  this,"  he  said,  "if  I  knew  you  were  going  to  be  here. 
If  you  was  to  come  down  here,  now,  and  stay  two  or  three 
days,  I  could  make  you  right  comfortable.  I  should  think 
you  might  like  that,  too,  if  you  care  to  have  things  quiet 
and  simple  like." 

Joe  said,  easily  enough,  at  the  end  of  not  more  than 
three  seconds  of  silence,  "Well,  we'll  have  to  talk  about 
that.  We've  got  to  go  back  to  New  York  to-night,  of 
course,  but  we'll  let  you  know  before  we  go." 

Down  in  the  buried  recesses  of  his  spirit  there  had  been 
a  shattering  burst  of  laughter  at  himself  for  a  romantic, 
unbelievable  fool.  It  was  that  caressing  touch  of  Violet's 
hand,  followed  by  her  ringing  of  the  bell,  that  seemed 
somehow  to  have  brought  down  the  whole  house  of  cards. 
It  had  happened  before  the  inn-keeper  had  made  his  happy 
suggestion  that  they  come  and  live  here  a  few  days,  or  he 
would  have  been  surprised  by  the  momentary  gleam  in 
Violet's  face  with  which  she  responded  to  it.  He  had 
looked  for  it  in  her  face,  knowing  it  would  be  there.  God, 
what  a  fool  he  had  been,  with  his  chivalry  and  his  precious 
ideals!  Well,  they  understood  each  other,  now! 

They  finished  their  lunch  in  silence,  after  their  host  had 
withdrawn  once  more,  and  then,  still  without  a  word,  re 
turned  to  the  veranda.  When  she  had  seated  herself  upon 
the  davenport,  he  sat  beside  her,  but  not  very  close,  and 


460         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

with  his  hands  clasped  between  his  knees.  She  asked  him 
what  time  it  was  and  he  told  her,  quarter  to  three. 

"Just  a  little  more  than  an  hour  left,"  she  commented 
forlornly.  "Will  that  be  long  enough,  do  you  suppose, 
for  you  to  forgive  me  in?  I  don't  think  I  can  bear  it 
if  you  don't." 

"There's  nothing  to  forgive,"  he  said.  "You're  per 
fectly  right  about  it — about  the  craziness  of  my  plan,  I 
mean.  I've  been  a  fool.  And  I've  times  of  being  what 
you  call  a  beast." 

"I  don't  call  you  that! — Except  when  I'm  so  frightened 
I  don 't  know  what  I  'm  saying.  Of  myself,  Joe,  more  than 
of  you.  I'm  the  worst  coward  in  the  world,  that's  the 
truth  about  me.  But  I  wish  I  didn't  make  you  so  un 
happy." 

"You  don't  need  to  worry  about  that,"  he  said. 
"You've  been  a  lot  kinder  to  me  than  I  deserve." 

"But  I'm  unhappy,  too,"  she  sobbed.  "Oh,  I  wish  I 
knew  what  to  do ! " 

He  pulled  her  up,  then,  in  his  arms  and  kissed  her,  and 
she,  with  a  deep  drawn  sigh  returned  the  kiss.  ""We've 
still  got  an  hour, ' '  he  said,  and  for  a  long  while  after  that 
they  spoke  of  nothing  more  to  the  purpose  than  the  sailing 
gulls  and  the  sheets  of  silver  left  by  the  receding  tide. 

She  asked  him,  though,  at  the  end  of  a  protracted 
silence,  what  he  was  thinking  about. 

"I've  been  trying  not  to  think  about  it,"  he  confessed. 
"But  I  am  a  beast,  and  I  can't  get  it  out  of  my  head." 

She  neither  spoke  nor  stirred  until  he  went  on. 

"It  isn't  as  if  we'd  tried  to  plan  it  out,  you  see.  But 
there  it  is.  That  simple  old  chap  takes  us  for  granted, 
absolutely.  "We  could  have  those  two  or  three  days  .  .  . 
If  you  telephoned  your  doctor  that  you  weren't  coming 
till  Wednesday  ...  I  don't  suppose  he'd  see  anything 
funny  in  that,  would  he? — Unless  your  friend  in  New 
York  should  take  it  into  her  head  to  run  over  and  pay  you 
,a  visit;  or  try  to  telephone  ..." 

"Doctor  Brown  won't  let  any  one  see  his  patients;  not 


ROMANCE  461 

till  after  the  first  three  or  four  days,  anyhow,  when  he's 
had  a  chance  to  see  how  bad  they  are.  Nor  telephone  them, 
either."  She  said  it  simply,  like  a  child,  and  despite  him 
self,  a  feeling  deeper  than  mere  sensual  excitement  caught 
him  by  the  throat. 

"Well,  then,"  he  went  on  raggedly,  "there's  nothing 
that  could  happen.  All  you  'd  have  to  do  to-morrow  would 
be  to  keep  your  Mrs.  Wentworth  from  actually  putting  you 
on  the  train.  You  come  down  to  the  same  station,  but  you 
take  our  little  train,  instead.  And  I'm  on  it.  And  we 
come  out  here  and  have  our  little — holiday.  Two  days, 
out  of  a  life-time. — Oh,  I  know  it's  impossible.  But  you 
asked  what  I  was  thinking  about,  and  that  was  it." 

"Do  you  want  me  to  do  it,  Joe?" 

The  simplicity  of  the  question,  and  the  intensity  of  the 
emotion  that  propelled  it,  literally,  for  an  instant,  stopped 
the  beat  of  his  heart.  His  eyes  filled  with  tears,  but 
through  the  blur  he  could  see  hers,  wide  with  a  sense  of 
great  adventure,  gazing  up  at  him. 

"I  don't  know,"  he  said.  "I  don't  know  whether  I 
want  you  to  or  not." 

Her  arms  tightened  about  him  and  she  uttered  a  shaky 
laugh.  "I  love  you  for  saying  that.  I'll  come,  Joe.  I 
won't  welsh  altogether.  I'll  give  you  those  two  days. — 
We've  got  to  be  starting  back  now.  You  go  find  the  man 
and  tell  him.  He'd  better  not  see  me  like  this." 

Joe  made  his  arrangements  and  they  caught  the  traia 
and  contrived,  very  tidily,  how  her  meeting  with  Alice 
Wentworth  at  six  should  be  made  plausible.  It  was  not 
till  hours  after  he  had  left  her  that  a  deeply  submerged 
cavern  in  him  caught  the  gleam  of  an  avenging  grin  at 
John  Williamson. 

15 

Violet  managed  her  meeting  with  Alice  Wentworth  with 
entire  success.  The  reason  why  Alice  hadn't  actually  seen 
her  coming  out  through  the  gate  was  sufficiently  suggested 
by  a  casual  half -sentence  and  a  gesture,  and  was  never; 
thought  of  again. 


462         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Alice  made  her  jump,  though,  by  saying, — holding  her 
off  in  both  hands  for  a  good  look,  "You've  been  deceiving 
John,  Violet.  I  don't  believe  in  your  Doctor  Brown  for 
one  minute.  A  nice-looking  nervous  wreck  you  are !  What 
did  you  come  on  for,  really?" 

A  moment  later,  as  she  saw  her  friendly  bit  of  badinage 
had  not  prospered,  she  explained,  "I  was  only  trying  to 
say,  Vi,  that  I'd  never  seen  you  looking  prettier.  Or  any 
younger,  hardly,  since  I  was  your  bridesmaid.  And  since 
I'd  been  wondering  whether  I  oughtn't  get  a  wheel-chair 
for  you,  it  was  such  a  relief  I  tried  to  be  funny. — I  ought 
to  have  known  better  at  my  age,  but  I  didn't,"  she  con 
cluded,  in  obvious  chagrin.  "Violet,  if  you  give  another 
thought  to  that  silly  joke,  I  shall  weep  right  here  in  public. 
• — Come  along.  It's  miles  to  the  car.  Have  your  red-cap 
give  your  bag  to  Wrenn ;  and  give  him  your  trunk  checks, 
too." 

"My  trunks!"  Violet  caught  her  breath.  The  disposal 
of  them  did  not  offer,  it  was  likely,  any  insoluble  problem, 
but  she  hadn't  thought  of  it  before,  nor,  apparently,  had 
Joe,  and  the  omission  rattled  her.  How  many  more  sunken 
reefs  of  this  sort  might  there  be? 

"You  poor  dear!"  Alice  cried.  "What  does  it  matter 
whether  you  send  them  up  or  leave  them  here?  You  said 
in  your  wire  you  might  stay  with  us  a  day  or  two ;  that 's 
all.  But  if  you  want  to  go  straight  on  to-morrow,  it's 
perfectly  easy."  She  possessed  herself,  by  good-humored 
violence,  of  the  checks  and  handed  them  over  to  the  grave 
kindly-looking  servant.  "Now  we  're  all  right,  at  last, ' '  she 
said  encouragingly,  and  Violet  had  to  suppress  an  hyster 
ical  desire  to  laugh  wildly.  Anyhow,  Alice  wras  no  longer 
skeptical  about  her  need  of  going  to  Doctor  Brown's! 

Save  for  panicky  flashes  of  elation  and  terror,  about 
equally  combined,  when  she  thought  of  to-morrow's  ad 
venture,  she  was  near  enough  her  natural  self  by  the  time 
the  drive  to  the  big  brown  house  in  the  East  Eighties  was 
accomplished.  Of  course  she'd  come  down  to  dinner,  and 
she'd  love  a  rubber  or  two  of  bridge  afterward.  There 


ROMANCE  463 

was  nothing  the  matter  with  her,  really,  except  that  she 
couldn't  sleep. 

"I  guess  you'd  better  telephone  John  if  you  feel  equal 
to  it,"  Alice  said,  when  she'd  come  up  with  her  to  her 
room.  "He  seems  to  be  rather  jumpy  about  you.  At 
least  he  sounded  that  way  to  me  this  afternoon  when  he 
telephoned." 

"What  was  he  telephoning  to  you  about!"  Violet  heard 
herself  ask,  in  a  voice  that  sounded  natural  enough  only 
rather  far  away.  She  didn't  as  yet  quite  see  why  she 
should  be  frightened,  but  she  was,  horribly. 

"Lie  down  a  minute,"  Alice  commanded  quietly,  after 
a  look  at  her.  "It's  all  right.  There  hasn't  anything 
happened.  He  tried  to  telephone  to  you,  that  was  all, 
and  when  they  told  him  you  weren't  here,  he  asked  for 
me.  He  seemed  to  have  the  idea  that  you'd  get  here  this 
morning,  and  couldn't  quite  get  it  through  his  head  when 
I  told  him  we  weren't  expecting  you  till  six.  That's  why 
it  struck  me  he  was  having  nerves  about  you." 

"Did  he  tell  you  why  he — wanted  to  talk  to  me?" 
Violet  was  a  long  time  getting  the  words  out,  and  she 
didn't  know  whether  they  were  audible  or  not. 

"Why  it  wasn't  anything  that  mattered,"  Alice  told 
her.  "Something,  I  believe,  that  your  cousin,  Margaret 
Craven,  had  meant  to  ask  you  about  before  you  went  away ; 
somebody's  address,  or  such  a  matter.  She  was  having 
lunch  with  him  and  he  said  he'd  telephone  and  find  out 
for  her.  It's  absolutely  nothing  to  bother  about,  you 
see." 

There  was  a  long  silence.  Finally  Violet  said,  "I  see 
what  happened.  John  thought  I  was  coming  on  the 
Broadway.  I  was,  but  I  missed  it.  And  he  always  laughs 
at  me  for  missing  trains,  so  I  didn't  call  him  up  and 
tell  him. — I  suppose  I  ought  to  telephone  him  now  ..." 

"My  dear,"  said  Alice,  "you  can't  talk  across  the 
room  to  me,  let  alone  to  Chicago.  I'll  wire  John  that 
you've  got  here  all  right — or  telephone,  if  you'd  rather." 

"No.     Wire  is  better,"  Violet  murmured. 


464         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

Despite  their  protests,  she  did  come  down  to  dinner  and 
played  bridge  furiously  all  the  evening.  It  was  her  last 
night  out,  she  told  them,  and  the  only  thing  in  the  world  she 
dreaded  was  going  to  bed.  Doctor  Brown  could  make  her 
do  it,  but  nobody  else  could.  And,  indeed,  when  she  knocked 
on  Alice's  door,  about  five  in  the  morning,  she  was  not  un 
dressed  beyond  a  negligee,  nor  had  she  lain  in  her  bed. 

She  was  beaten,  by  them.  The  night  had  been  too 
much  for  her.  She  had  kept  up  the  fight — Joe's  fight, 
she  put  it — as  long  as  she  could.  Her  terrors  had  abated 
her  desire  for  him,  and  even  made  her  believe  at  moments 
that  she  whole-heartedly  hated  him,  but  they  did  not  rid 
her  of  him.  She  trembled  at  the  thought  of  his  rage  if  she 
were  to  fail  to  meet  their  rendezvous.  What  would  he 
do?  "What  mightn't  he  do — a  man  like  that!  She  told 
herself  she  wouldn't  be  safe  from  him  for  years — never — 
if  she  disappointed  him  that  morning. 

But,  even  so,  she  was  less  afraid  of  him  than  she  was  of 
Margaret  Craven.  Margaret  had  never  liked  her  much, 
and  had  for  years  been  distinctly  romantic  about  John. 
She  took  John's  part  in  their  small  quarrels  and  lectured 
her  by  implication  about  her  duties  to  him.  John  spoiled 
her — was  forever  doing  things  for  her.  Whenever,  in 
Violet's  absence,  he  needed  a  hostess,  he  called  her  in. 
Lunching  with  him,  to-day !  of  course  she  was ! 

It  had  never,  though,  until  now  occurred  to  her  to 
regard  Margaret  seriously.  In  the  matter  of  Joe  Greer, 
she  had  from  the  beginning  taken  Margaret 's  enmity  light- 
heartedly  enough.  She  had  written  to  Joe  back  in  August, 
"  Margaret  looks  at  me  as  if  she  would  like  to  slay  me, 
and  I  don't  mind  a  bit."  Up  to  now  she  had  considered 
herself  impregnable.  That  was  the  amount  of  it. 

But  to-night  her  vision  of  that  lunch, — Margaret  talk 
ing  about  her  with  pretended  affection  and  concern,  egg 
ing  John  on  to  telephone  to  her, — awakened  a  horrifying 
surmise.  Violet  had  been  careless  about  Joe  before  Mar 
garet,  last  summer.  She  had  talked  about  him  unneces 
sarily.  Margaret  might  have  guessed  a  good  deal. 


ROMANCE  465 

And  then,  there  was  Henry.  Henry  more  than  guessed ; 
he  knew.  He  wouldn't  have  betrayed  her  wilfully,  but 
he  was  helpless  in  Margaret's  hands.  If  he  let  her  get 
hold  of  an  end  of  a  thread  to  work  on,  she  'd  have  unraveled 
pretty  much  the  whole  thing. 

Mightn't  she,  then,  have  suspected  this  New  York  trip 
from  the  first?  And  wasn't  that  why  she  had  made  John 
telephone  T  Well,  the  trick  had  worked.  The  alibi  was 
exploded.  (What  a  fool  Alice  had  been  to  give  her  away 
like  that!)  Violet  could  see  John's  face,  perplexed  but 
still  unsuspicious — John  was  a  dear,  that  way — as  he  came 
back  to  Margaret  from  the  telephone.  "It's  a  funny 
thing,"  he  would  have  said.  "They  aren't  expecting  her 
until  the  six  o'clock  train  to-night." 

How  would  Margaret  have  played  that  handT  Would 
she  have  laid  down  her  cards  ?  ' '  Poor  old  John,  don 't  you 
know  who  it  was  she  went  to  New  York  to  see  ? "  Or  had 
she  been  subtler  than  that?  Whipped  up  his  alarm  over 
Violet's  safety?  Aphasia  or  amnesia — or  whatever  they 
call  it  that  people  disappear  with.  Had  she  already 
started  him  to  New  York  to  find  her? 

It  would  work  out  to  a  handsome  revenge  for  Margaret 
if  she  had  persuaded  him  to  do  that. — But  was  revenge 
what  Margaret  wanted?  Or  was  it  Violet's  own  place — 
her  secure  place  with  John,  long  coveted,  that  she  thought 
she  saw  a  chance  to  get? 

It  was  when  her  thoughts  reached  this  destination  that 
she  knocked  on  Alice  Wentworth's  door.  One  of  her 
random  reflections  during  the  night  had  been  that  Alice, 
if  she  had  ever  looked  at  the  sending  point  of  her  tele 
gram,  must  have  perceived  that  she  had  lied  about  the 
trains.  But  this  was  the  merest  incidental.  She  had  no 
fear  left  for  anybody — after  Joe  and  Margaret  had  taken 
their  respective  shares.  She  told  Alice,  in  a  manner  of 
the  most  intense  calm,  that  she  must  go  back  to  Chicago  at 
once — on  the  very  next  train  that  left.  She  didn't  care 
what  road — only  not  on  the  Pennsylvania. 

She  gave  John,  who  met  her  in  the  LaSalle  Street  station 


466         JOSEPH  GREER  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

at  seven  o'clock  the  next  morning,  the  most  electrifying 
surprise  he  had  experienced  since  she  had  told  him,  twenty 
years  before,  that  she  would  marry  him.  The  sort  of  hug 
and  kiss  she  bestowed  upon  him  on  the  platform  was  un 
usual  enough,  but  nothing  to  what  followed.  She  made 
light  of  her  illness,  as  they  walked  through  the  station  to 
the  car  in  which  he'd  driven  down  from  Lake  Forest  to 
meet  her.  She'd  had  a  silly  attack  of  the  flutters,  had 
got  over  it,  and  had  come  home  as  quickly  as  she  could  to 
reassure  him  that  she  was  all  right.  He'd  have  found 
this  rather  hard  to  believe  had  not  her  looks  completely 
borne  her  out. 

After  they  were  seated  in  the  car,  with  the  chauffeur 
waiting  to  be  told  where  they  wanted  to  go,  he  asked  her 
— jocularly,  so  that  it  would  be  easy  for  her  to  refuse — 
if  she'd  like  to  have  breakfast  at  the  club  with  him  before 
she  drove  home. 

"Can't  you  come  home  to  breakfast  with  me,  John?" 
she  asked.  "Just  for  the  ride  and  the  visit?"  And  be 
hind  Jeffrey's  statuesque  back,  as  they  rolled  up  Sheridan 
Road,  she  sat  close  to  him  and  held  his  hand! 

Three  or  four  miles  from  home  he  told  her  he  had 
Margaret  out  there  to  look  after  her  and  stave  things  off 
that  she  mightn't  want  to  bother  with. 

"That's  all  right  if  she  doesn't  stave  you  off,"  Violet 
said,  with  a  small  nervous  laugh. 

"As  long  as  she's  there,"  she  went  on  a  moment  later, 
"I  think  I'll  tell  you  something  now.  Because  she  makes 
it  hard,  somehow — this  is  what  I  meant  just  now — for  me 
to  talk  to  you.  Well,  that 's  all  it  is,  really.  I  don 't  want 
you — staved  off,  John,  by  anybody.  I  don't  want  to  be 
— let  alone.  To  go  my  own  ways.  That  sort  of  thing.  I 
know  I've  made  you  think  I  did.  That's  a  trick  most 
women  have,  I  guess.  But  they  don't  mean  it.  At  least 
I  don't. — Not  any  more.  I'd  like  to  have  you  with  me — 
all  the  time.  Day  and  night." 

He  looked  at  her  gravely ;  almost — if  that  had  been  pos 
sible  for  John — suspiciously.  "Violet,"  he  asked,  "have 


ROMANCE  467 

you  been  frightened  by   anything?     Or  anybody?     Are 
you  afraid  of  anything,  now?" 

She  met  his  look  steadily.  "There  isn't  a  thing. 
There's  only  one  thing.  And  that  is  that  some  day  you 
may  get  tired  of  me."  At  the  look  this  drew  from  him  she 
uttered  a  sobbing  laugh  and  flung  herself  upon  him.  "It 
isn't  a  nightwatchman  I  want  you  for,"  she  said. 

16 

From  the  ninth  of  October,  when  Joe  telegraphed  Jen 
nie  for  information  on  the  totals  of  the  drafts  that  were 
coming  in,  his  office  heard  no  word  of  him  until  within 
a  week  of  the  expiration  of  Williamson 's  offer.  It  was  an 
anxious  time  for  Jennie,  saved  from  being  desperate  only 
by  a  continual  asseveration  of  her  faith  that  Joe  would 
turn  up  in  time,  bringing  some  sort  of  means  of  salvation 
with  him. 

But  on  Tuesday,  the  second  of  November — election  day, 
that  was — just  as  she  was  getting  ready  to  leave  the  office 
at  the  end  of  the  afternoon,  a  boy  from  the  Stratford  Hotel 
brought  her  a  note  written  in  lead  pencil,  in  a  hand  so 
little  like  Joe's  that  momentarily  she  doubted  the  signa 
ture.  It  asked  her  simply  to  come  up  and  see  him  as  soon 
as  she  could,  telling  her  the  number  of  the  room  he  was 
in.  He  had  scribbled  the  words,  "It's  all  right,"  after 
signing,  but  this  she  took  as  referring  merely  to  the  pro 
priety  of  her  visit. 

With  a  heart-sickening  premonition  that  everything  that 
mattered  had  utterly  gone  wrong,  she  went  along  with  the 
bellboy  to  the  hotel  and  had  him  show  her  up  to  Joe's 
room. 

He  called  in  answer  to  her  knock,  "Come  in,  Jennie,  if 
that's  you." 

It  was  then  nearly  six  o'clock,  fully  dark  long  since, 
out-of-doors,  yet  his  room  was  unlighted  save  by  a  small 
night  lamp  upon  the  bed-stand.  Joe,  all  alone,  was  sit 
ting  in  an  easy  chair  that  had  been  drawn  up  to  one  of 
the  windows,  a  rug  across  his  knees.  He  looked  round  at 


468         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

her  and  nodded  toward  another  chair  that  shared  the 
embrasure,  but  made  no  other  move. 

' '  And  they  call  this  an  election  night  ? "  he  said,  looking 
out  over  the  boulevard — and  away  from  her.  "Why,  in 
the  town  I  grew  up  in,  they  could  get  up  more  excitement 
than  this  over  a  dog  fight!" 

It  was  all  she  could  do  not  to  weep.  It  did  not  seem 
possible  that  the  six  weeks  since  she  had  last  seen  him,  in 
Fargo,  could  have  made  such  devastating  changes  in  the 
man  she  knew.  He  was  shrunken,  chilly — huddled  under 
his  rug ;  the  hand  he  finally  offered  her  was  slack  and  his 
voice  spiritless,  despite  the  pitiable  effort  he  made  at  his 
familiar  manner.  She  stood  speechless,  holding  the  limp 
hand  he  had  given  her  in  both  her  own. 

"Oh,  hell,  let's  get  it  over  with!"  he  exclaimed  at  last. 
"Sit  down.  You  want  to  know  what's  happened,  I  sup 
pose.  I'm  licked — that's  the  short  of  it." 

"You're  sick,"  she  retorted.  "That's  the  main 
trouble." 

"See  that  in  the  dark,  can  you?"  he  asked,  with  a 
drawn  grin.  "Well,  you're  wrong.  What  you  see  is  only 
a  by-product  of  the  damnedest  big  drunk  I  ever  had,  I 
guess  it  must  have  been.  I  wasn't  there,  except  at  the 
start,  till  after  it  was  all  over,  but  that's  my  best  judg 
ment  on  it." 

In  this  mocking  tormenting  humor  he  was  perfectly  in 
tractable,  she  knew.  All  you  could  do  was  to  follow  along, 
keeping  back  the  tears  as  well  as  you  could,  till  he  changed. 

"Celebrating  something,  were  you?"  she  asked. 

"You  might  say  I  was,  in  a  way.  It  wasn't  over  hav 
ing  sold  our  flax,  though,  nor  borrowed  the  money  to  pay 
for  it.  Not  a  pound  nor  a  dollar.  But  celebration  isn't 
a  bad  word  for  it,  at  that." 

"They've  really  beaten  us,  then,  have  they,  Joe?" 

Even  then  she  half  expected  his  great  laugh  and  a  com 
mand  to  look  in  some  drawer  or  pocket  for  the  evidence  of 
his  triumph.  It  didn't  come.  There  was  a  long-stretched 
silence  instead. 


ROMANCE  469 

"It  wasn't  they  that  beat  me,"  he  said  at  last.  "They 
couldn't  have  done  it.  It  was  the  other  thing. — I  guess 
you  know  that,  don't  you?  Didn't  you  see  anything 
queer  when  you  came  up  to  Fargo,  in  September?  Not 
about  them;  about  me?" 

She  nodded.     "Whisky,  you  mean?" 

"I  give  you  my  word  I  didn't  know  it  then,  Jennie.  I 
thought  I  was  all  right.  I  knew  I  needed  an  ungodly 
amount  of  it,  and  I  didn't  want  a  lot  of  meddlers  buzzing 
about  it,  so  I  kept  it  dark.  I  honestly  thought  there  was 
no  more  harm  in  it,  for  me,  than  there  was  in  my  mother's 
milk.  I'd  happened  to  find  out  that  it  did  stop  that 
damned  headache  of  mine,  if  I  drank  enough  of  it,  and 
so  far  as  I  could  see  that  was  all  it  did.  Damned  fool  of 
course.  I  must  have  been  doped  with  it,  for  weeks  up 
there,  not  to  have  seen  what  Williamson's  crowd  was  do 
ing.  I  didn  't  find  out  what  was  the  matter  with  me  until 
the  night  you  telephoned — and  hung  up  on  me." 

"And  of  course,  you  couldn't  quit  then,"  she  com 
mented;  "right  in  the  middle  of  everything." 

"I  did  though.  I  stopped  dead.  Didn't  have  a  single 
drop  of  whisky  or  any  other  sort  of  hootch  all  that  week. 
It  was  funny  about  that.  My  body  was  crazy,  but  my 
mind  must  have  been  damned  near  right.  I  all  but  landed 
that  Carberry  bunch.  I  could  feel  'em  coming  right 
along.  But  they  must  have  had  a  talk  with  their  bankers, 
because  on  Friday  afternoon  they  began  to  blow  cold.  I 
dropped  them  right  there  and  went  to  Snell.  He  took  me 
to  a  late  studio  party  Saturday  night,  and  I  didn't  even 
take  a  drink  then.  Left  him  with  a  date — for  Tuesday,  I 
think  it  was. — Or  it  may  have  been  Monday. — The  same 
day.  I  guess  that  was  it.  Along  in  the  afternoon." 

She  was  puzzled  by  the  phrase  "the  same  day"  but 
nothing  would  have  induced  her  to  ask  him  what  he  meant. 
She  could  see  his  eyes  glowing  in  the  dusk  of  the  room. 
In  the  silence  between  them  she  heard,  coming  up  faintly 
from  the  boulevard,  a  few  hoarse  shouts  and  the  bleat  of 
horns.  She  saw  the  horizontal  sweep  of  the  beam  of  a 


470         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

searchlight,  and  some  area  of  her  mind  recalled  the  fact 
that  this  meant  Harding 's  election  to  the  presidency  of  the 
United  States.  How  could  they  know  so  soon?  And 
what  did  it  matter? 

"I  had  a  funny  week-end,  Jennie,"  Joe  went  on,  at 
last.  "Damned  funny.  I'm  glad  I  didn't  murder  any 
body.  I'd  run  amuck,  no  doubt  of  that.  Part  of  me  had. 
But  part  of  me  must  have  been  all  right ;  clearer  than  ever 
that  I*  had  to  get  that  money  from  Snell.  I  kept  my  ap 
pointment  with  him  on  the  dot. 

' '  The  queer  thing  was,  I  didn  't  want  a  drink.  I  re 
member  it  struck  me  I  was  cured  of  that,  anyhow.  What 
I  couldn't  stand  about  Snell  was  that  he  was  so  slow. 
His  body  as  well  as  his  wits.  He  couldn't  seem  even  to 
put  his  hands  where  he  wanted  them  to  go  without  fum 
bling.  And  his  brains  seemed  made  of  leather.  I  thought 
I'd  go  crazy  waiting  for  him  to  catch  up.  I  didn't  let  him 
see  that,  though.  I  was  making  a  pretty  good  start  with 
him;  getting  him  warm.  Of  course  I  didn't  know,  except 
from  his  say-so,  that  he  had  any  real  money — enough  to 
do  me  any  good — but  I  was  going  to  get  him  anyway. 

' '  I  don 't  know  where  the  bottle  of  hootch  came  from.  I 
suppose  he  got  it  out  of  his  desk.  I'd  forgotten  all  about 
it.  Forgotten  I  wasn't  drinking,  see?  I  guess  I  poured 
out  that  first  little  drink  without  noticing — just  as  you'd 
light  a  cigarette.  Drank  it  the  same  way.  And  then  I 
remember  the  queer  look  there  was  in  his  face  when  he 
watched  me  pour  out  my  first  real  drink. 

"I  can't  remember  much  beyond  that,  except  in  bits. 
I  think  we  kept  on  talking  business  for  a  while.  And  then 
we  went  to  places.  Different  places.  I  don't  know  when 
he  left  me — that  night  or  later.  I  remember  talking  to  a 
girl,  a  serious  poor  devil  of  a  girl,  with  a  scar  on  her 
upper  lip,  for  hours.  Quite  a  talk,  that  was,  I'll  bet. 
Would  have  made  a  good  added  book  for  the  Old  Testa 
ment.  And  then  sometime  later  that  week,  or  it  may  have 
been  the  next  Sunday — it  seemed  like  Sunday — I  found  I 
was  pretty  sick,  and  seeing  things,  so  I  took  myself  in  a 


ROMANCE  471 

taxi  up  to  Bellevue  Hospital.  I  don't  believe  I'd  have 
come  to  that  if  I  hadn't  quit  for  a  week.  However,  there 
it  was.  They  kept  me  f  there  till  yesterday.  Then  I  had 
'em  telegraph  Bennett  and  send  me  out  here.  Got  in  this 
afternoon  about  three  o'clock.  I  had  to  get  here  to  fix 
things  up  with  you,  and  I  wasn't  sure  when  our  option 
on  Williamson's  offer  ran  out.  There's  still  a  day  or  two, 
isn't  there?" 

She  nodded,  a  little  absently.  "Yes,  that's  all  right. 
We  have  till  Friday."  She  sat  for  a  while  very  still, 
weeping  quietly  and  trusting  to  the  dark  that  he  shouldn't 
see.  Then  she  reached  for  both  his  hands  and  held  them 
in  a  tight  clutch. 

"If  there's  anything,  Joe — anything  in  the  world,  that 
I  can  do — to  help  you,  tell  me,  and  I'll  do  it." 

"Why,  there's  quite  a  lot,"  he  said,  rather  flatly. 

At  his  tone  she  snatched  her  hands  away  and  caught 
back  a  sob.  In  a  moment,  though,  in  a  cheerful — almost 
secretarial — voice  she  managed  to  say,  "All  right.  Tell 
me  everything  you  can  think  of.  I  don't  believe  I'll  for 
get  anything."  He  did  not  begin,  however;  sat  a  long 
while  in  what  she  took  to  be  meditation.  Finally  he  gave 
a  weak,  distressful  laugh.  "I  can't  seem  to  remember  any 
of  'em.  Non  compos  by  streaks,  that 's  what  it  amounts  to. 
Wait  a  minute !  I  've  got  the  gist  of  it.  Nathan 's  coming 
round  pretty  soon  with  a  power  of  attorney,  just  as  broad 
as  he  can  draw  it,  for  you.  I'll  sign  it,  and  then  you  can 
act  for  me  in  everything,  see?  Say  what  you  like  to 
Williamson.  Make  any  sort  of  damn  bargain  you  please. 
Don't  have  to  bother  with  details  after  that." 

She  was  appalled  by  the  prospect  of  assuming,  single- 
handed,  so  great  a  responsibility,  and  for  a  while  she  pro 
tested  against  being  saddled  with  it. 

' '  You  said  you  'd  do  anything,  didn  't  you  ? "  he  reminded 
her  irritably.  ' '  Consult  any  one  you  like,  of  course.  Only 
you'll  be  the  boss." 

She  must  have,  she  insisted,  some  inkling  of  what  Joe 
wanted  done  with  Williamson's  offer.  She  couldn't  hope 


472         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

to  better  it  materially.  Was  she  authorized  to  accept  it  as 
it  stood? 

At  this  there  was  a  flare  of  something  that  looked  like 
the  old  Joe.  "I'd  see  'em  damned  before  they  got  a  pound 
of  our  flax  on  those  terms.  I  'd  pull  the  whole  thing  down. 
Put  the  company  in  bankruptcy.  Samson  and  the  pil 
lars,  by  God!  And  then  I'd  start  in  and  design  around 
our  old  patents  and  make  the  process  public  property. 
Like  the  Babcock  separator.  See  how  they'd  look,  then!" 

"If  we  go  into  bankruptcy,"  she  pointed  out  to  him, 
"most  of  the  subsidiaries  will  go  too,  and  then  "William 
son's  crowd  will  be  able  to  get  the  flax  for  practically 
whatever  they  choose  to  pay  for  it." 

The  flare  died  down  as  suddenly  as  it  had  sprung  up. 
Joe  heaved  a  long  sigh.  "You're  right  about  that,  I 
guess,"  he  said.  "You'll  just  have  to  do  whatever  seems 
best  to  you.  I'm  through,  Jennie. — For  this  round  any 
how." 

She  caught  eagerly  at  the  hint  in  that  last  phrase.  It 
was  only  his  illness  that  made  him  feel  he  was  beaten,  and 
it  wouldn't  last  long.  All  he  had  to  consider  was  the 
quickest  way  of  getting  well.  Doctor  Bennett,  she  sup 
posed,  had  the  cure  in  charge. 

"Oh,  yes,"  he  said.  "Bennett's  got  a  place  in  mind 
where  they've  got  a  system  for  treating  my  complaint. 
Going  down  there  with  me  to-morrow.  Turns  'em  out  as 
good  as  new,  they  say." 

There  was  nothing  but  a  tolerant  skepticism  in  his  voice, 
but  Jennie  thought  she  had  seen  the  merest  gleam  of  some 
thing  else  go  across  his  face — a  faint  reminder  of  his  old 
boyish  grin. 

Presently  he  spoke  again.  "There's  one  thing  I  was 
forgetting.  I  want  some  money.  About  a  hundred  and 
fifty  dollars  in  currency.  Bring  it  around  to-morrow 
morning,  early,  will  you?  Bring  it  yourself  and  see  that 
I  get  it." 

Evidently  it  was  a  relief  to  him  that  he'd  succeeded  in 
remembering  this.  This  concluded  the  business  and  now 


ROMANCE  473 

he  relaxed.  He  didn't  want  her  to  go.  He  wanted  to 
talk.  Let  Jennie  ring  up  the  dining-room  and  order  her- 
Belf  some  dinner.  He  had  his  own  meals  at  nursery  hours. 
^Nursery  meals,  too.  But  these  weren't  reasons  for  starv 
ing  her. 

She  didn  't  feel  much  like  eating,  but  she  did  as  he  asked 
and  was  rewarded  by  the  pleasure  he  took  in  the  convivial 
atmosphere  which  her  tray  when  it  arrived,  created.  He 
mocked  himself,  but  not  bitterly.  "I  never  thought  I'd  be 
asking  a  lady  to  dinner  with  me  like  this,"  he  observed. 

' '  It 's  funny  how  things  hang  together, ' '  he  added,  after 
a  thoughtful  pause.  "That  gang  would  never  have  got 
the  jump  on  me  the  way  they  did  if  I  hadn't  been  saturated 
with  whisky.  And  I  'd  never  have  got  saturated  except  for 
my  headache.  And  I  wouldn't  have  had  the  headache  if 
I  hadn't  got  hit  by  that  automobile.  And  I  suppose,  if 
the  chauffeur  who  drove  it  hadn't  been  thinking  about 
'his  best  girl  or  some  such  nonsense,  he  wouldn't  have  hit 
me." 

The  gleam  died  out  of  his  eyes.  She  tried  desperately 
to  think  of  something  light-hearted  to  say,  but  found  her 
self  speechless.  She  knew  only  too  well  the  connotation  he 
had  stumbled  upon  in  those  last  words  about  a  chauffeur 
and  his  best  girl. 

''You're  thinking  farther  back  than  that,"  he  went 
on,  in  a  darker  tone.  "You're  thinking  that  if  I'd  taken 
your  advice,  another  time  we  had  dinner  together,  about  a 
letter  I  wanted  to  write  to  Pasadena,  I  wouldn  't  have  been 
•wandering  around  the  streets,  seeing  red.  Well,  I  give  it 
to  you.  You  were  right  about  that,  Jennie." 

She  gathered  up  her  courage  and  plunged.  "I  don't 
think  you  'd  say  that,  Joe,  if  you  could  see  Beatrice  as  she 
is  now." 

"You've  been  seeing  her?"  he  asked. 

"Once  in  a  while.  Not  often.  She  came  into  the  of 
fice  two  or  three  weeks  ago,  on  her  way  through  Chicago.*' 

"Hasn't  been  coming  to  you  for  money,  has  she?  Jen 
nie,  by  God,  if  you've  given  her  any  ..." 


"She's  never  asked  for  any.  I'm  going  to  tell  you 
something,  Joe.  I  guess  I  ought  to  have  done  it  long  ago. 
She  sent  back  that  thousand  dollars  you  gave  George  when 
you  discharged  him.  He  insisted  on  it,  she  said.  She 
sent  a  check  for  it  in  that  letter  you  had  me  tear  up,  un« 
opened.  But  when  I  told  her  we'd  torn  up  the  letter,, 
she  said  she'd  let  that  settle  it." 

He  surprised  Jennie  by  laughing  at  this.  "That's  like 
Trix,"  he  remarked.  Jennie  had  plenty  more  to  say  now, 
but  decided  to  wait  and  let  the  silence  work.  After  a 
while  he  said,  "I  suppose  she's  got  a  baby  by  now." 

"No,"  she  told  him.     "No  signs  of  one  yet." 

She  was  puzzled  by  the  way  he  took  this,  and  astonished 
at  the  question  it  presently  led  to.  "Jennie,"  he  de 
manded  harshly,  "do  you  believe  she  ran  straight  with 
that  fellow — up  to  the  time  he  married  her?  She  told  me 
she  did.  Do  you  suppose  it  was  true?" 

"Well,  there's  certainly  no  reason  for  doubting  it." 
But  she  saw  he  took  this  for  an  evasion — which  indeed  it 
was.  "Joe,"  she  cried,  "what  possible  difference  does 
it  make?  She's  been  married  to  him  now,  happily,  for 
almost  a  year." 

"It  makes  this  difference,"  he  insisted;  "if  she  was 
straight  with  him,  he  may  stick  to  her.  If  she  wasn't, 
he'll  leave  her.  He'll  always  be  suspicious,  if  she  was  too 
free  with  him,  that  she  will  be  again,  some  time,  with 
somebody  else." 

There  was  nothing  to  be  gained  by  arguing  a  point  like 
this,  anyhow.  ' '  Trix  has  developed  a  lot  in  this  last  year, ' ' 
she  told  him.  "I  said  she  was  happily  married,  and  I 
think  she  is,  but  even  if  it  doesn't  work  out  any  too  well, 
she  won't  be — smashed  by  it.  She's  been  studying  hard; 
learning  a  whole  lot  of  things.  She 's  found  a  way  of  earn 
ing  money,  quite  a  lot  of  money.  It's  a  funny  way  but 
she 's  as  proud  of  it  as  can  be. ' ' 

She  broke  off  there,  thinking  if  she  waited  she  could 
make  him  ask,  but  he  did  not  speak.  The  silence  sud 
denly  took  on  the  quality  of  granite. 


ROMANCE  475 

She  uttered,  at  last,  a  forlorn  laugh.  "Trix  won't  ask 
about  you,  either,"  she  explained.  "She  is  like  you,  Joe. 
Getting  more  like  you  every  day. — Oh,  it's  a  crime,  that's 
what  it  is!  When  two  people  adore  each  other  the  way 
you  do."  She  turned  on  him  with  an  impetuous  gesture 
of  appeal.  "Joe,  she  isn't  far  away.  She'll  come  to 
you  like  a — like  a  bird  if  you'll  just  let  me  send  her  a  ten- 
word  telegram." 

His  response  to  this  was  a  veritable  snarl  of  anger,  like 
that  of  a  wounded  beast.  "None  of  that,  Jennie.  Drop 
it,  and  drop  it  quick.  Ask  her  to  come  and  see  me  like 
this!"  He  was  panicky  about  it,  too;  would  not  be  con 
tent  with  less  than  an  unequivocal  promise  that  the  girl 
should  be  told  nothing.  "When  Jennie  had  given  him  this, 
he  quieted  down  again. 

"I'll  see  her  again  some  time,"  he  said.  "But  it'll  be 
when  I'm  up;  not  when  I'm  down  like  this.  I'll  be  sit 
ting  on  the  world  again  some  day,  Jennie,  and  then  we'll 
see  what  Trix  has  to  say.  She  had  her  last  shot  at  me 
when  I  was  flat  on  my  back,  and  what  she  did  to  me  was 
a  plenty.  Next  time  it's  going  to  be  different." 

This  brought  him  round  to  the  old  refrain,  his  defeat 
by  Williamson's  crowd  and  how  it  had  come  about.  How 
it  would  never  have  come  about  if  he  had  been  in  full 
possession  of  his  faculties.  She  was  hard  put  to  it  not  to 
let  him  see  how  she  flinched  from  this.  He  would  have 
seen  in  a  flash,  of  course,  if  he  'd  been  the  old  Joe. 

"I've  been  wondering,"  he  said,  "what  it  was  gave  'em 
the  idea  of  selling  out  in  the  first  place.  I  suppose  they 
must  have  got  on,  somehow,  back  in  August  or  so,  to  the 
fact  that  I  controlled  the  majority  of  the  stock,  and  that 
made  'em  think  about  getting  from  under.  Well,  they 
know  how  to  keep  their  faces,  that  bunch ! ' ' 

"They'd  known  it  longer  than  that,"  she  told  him. 
"Since  before  the  April  meeting." 

"Like  hell  they  had!"  he  exclaimed,  staring  at  her. 
"What  makes  you  think  so?" 

"Oh,  Henry  made  it  pretty  plain  from  something  he 


476         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

said  the  other  day. ' '  She  wished,  uneasily,  that  she  hadn  't 
started  this,  but  it  was  too  late  to  stop  now. 

"Do  you  mean  Henry  himself  knew  about  it  then?"  he 
persisted,  and  she  nodded  a  reluctant  assent. 

"How  about  Henry's  own  stock?"  he  asked.  "Did  he 
sell  that  out  along  with  the  rest?" 

"Why,  I  guess  it  never  was  really  his.  Williamson 
carried  it  for  him,  I  suppose.  I  don't  believe  he  sold  it 
all,  or  Henry  would  have  resigned  from  the  directorate 
when  the  others  did.  But  probably  most  of  it  went  with 
the  rest. — I  don't  actually  know  anything  much.  He  and 
I  don't  talk  things  over,  these  days." 

She  perceived,  to  her  great  distress,  that  in  giving  Joe 
this  piece  of  information  she  had  somehow  dealt  him  a 
heavy  blow.  "Henry  Craven,"  he  repeated  blankly. 
*' Henry  Craven,  my  God! — Why,  Jennie,  I'd  have  sworn 
I  knew  everything  that  went  on  behind  that  little  man's 
eye-glasses.  And  he's  known,  you  say,  ever  since  way 
back  last  winter  what  that  bunch  was  cooking  for  me? 
He  liked  me,  too.  He  liked  both  of  us.  And  he  never 
cared  a  damn  for  them.  I  know  he  didn't." 

' '  He 's  loyal,  though, ' '  she  said.  "  He 's  the  most  scrupu 
lous  man  I've  ever  known.  His  duty  was  to  them,  of 
course. ' ' 

"Hell,  I  didn't  expect  him  to  tell  me  anything,"  Joe 
explained.  "I  thought  I'd  see  it  in  his  looks." 

"He's  been  looking — ghastly,  these  last  two  weeks,"  she 
told  him,  but  this  fact  no  longer  interested  Joe. 

"They're  a  different  breed,  Jennie,"  he  said  at  last. 
"They're  a  herd.  Locking  horns  and  shoving  among 
themselves  until  an  outsider  comes  along,  and  then  they  all 
face  the  same  way  and  put  down  their  heads.  They  know 
how  to  wait,  too.  They're  in  no  hurry.  They  know  a 
man '11  be  down,  sometime.  They  don't  have  to  try  to  trip 
him.  Wait  for  him,  that's  all  they  do.  I  made  good  on 
my  process;  made  thirty  million  pounds  of  valuable  stuff 
out  of  something  that  had  always  been  thought  worthless, 
but  they  got  me.  This  time." 


ROMANCE  477 

Nathan  came  in  about  then  with  the  power  of  attorney, 
and  by  the  time  it  had  been  read  and  talked  over  and 
signed,  Doctor  Bennett  appeared  and  made  no  secret  of  his 
disapproval  of  their  business  with  his  patient.  So  Jennie, 
as  soon  as  it  was  possible,  took  her  leave. 

Joe  stopped  her  on  the  way  to  the  door  with  a  last  re 
minder.  "Don't  forget  that  errand  I  gave  you.  And  be 
sure  to  come  back  first  thing  to-morrow  morning  and  tell 
me  about  it." 

' '  I  won 't  forget, ' '  she  promised,  but  she  went  away  with 
a  sadly  divided  mind.  He  had  made  it  plain  that  the 
hundred  and  fifty  dollars  he  had  asked  her  to  get  him  was 
not  going  to  be  mentioned  to  Doctor  Bennett.  "Wasn't  it 
her  duty,  in  the  light  of  Joe's  condition,  to  tell?  She 
demolished  this  question  with  a  violent  negative.  Joe  was 
still  her  boss,  and  he  knew  what  he  wanted  better  than  all 
the  doctors  in  Chicago. 

There  ran  in  her  mind  that  night,  as  she  vainly  tried  to 
sleep,  an  episode  in  one  of  Kipling's  jungle  stories,  about 
a  tiger — not  a  completely  admirable  tiger,  either — who 
was  charged  and  trampled  by  a  herd  of  buffalo.  The 
thought  of  that  beautiful  lithe  thing  beaten  down  into 
the  mire  under  those  heavy  insensate  hoofs  was  unbear 
ably  tragic. 

They  had  got  him,  indeed,  as  Joe  said.  "This  time." 
"Was  it  believable  that  there  could  be  a  next  time?  Dur 
ing  the  dark  of  that  night,  at  least,  this  was  beyond  the 
capacity  of  Jennie  Mac  Arthur's  faith. 


THERE  has  not  been,  and  of  course  there  never  will  be, 
a  "next  time"  for  Joe  Greer,  if  one  means  by  the  phrase 
a  return  match  with  John  Williamson  and  his  allies.  This 
story  which  began — if  a  story  can  be  said  to  begin — on  the 
April  day  in  1919  when  they  organized  the  company, 
ended  on  the  Friday  after  Harding 's  election  when  Jennie 
went  to  Williamson's  office  and  signed,  under  Joe's  power 
of  attorney,  the  contract  the  financiers  offered  her.  They 
were  completely  and  finally  the  victors ;  the  spoils  of  Joe 's 
process  for  making  linen  of  the  straw  that  had  once  been 
burned  in  the  fields  belonged  to  them;  not  to  Joe  whose 
imagination  had  conceived  the  process,  nor  to  the  small 
careful  modestly  prosperous  folk  who  built  the  •mills,  nor 
to  the  farmers  who  grew  the  flax. 

Reluctantly  one  concedes  the  improbability  of  any  other 
outcome,  even  if  Joe  had  never  summoned  his  disturbing 
daughter  from  California  to  live  with  him,  nor  sustained  a 
concussion  of  the  brain  and  resorted  to  alcohol  as  a  cure, 
nor  fallen  in  love  with  his  antagonist's  wife.  Unimagi 
native,  soft,  irresolute,  kindly,  as  these  stall-fed  folk  seemed 
to  him  to  be,  their  qualities  are  more  than  he  can  cope  with. 
They  are  truly  gregarious;  they  are,  by  tradition  and 
temper,  collectors,  harvesters,  stowers-away,  and  a  man  like 
Joe,  who  has  no  real  interest  in  property  beyond  the  dy 
namic  use  of  it  as  a  part  of  the  processes  of  getting  some 
thing  done,  stands  little  chance  against  them. 

There's  another  side  to  the  thing,  though.  If  John  Will 
iamson's  jolly  little  daughter  Dorothy  is  ever  swept  from 
her  moorings  by  some  storm  of  passion,  as  Beatrice  was 

478 


BELOW  THE  FALLS  479 

swept,  into  an  alien  world,  that  experience  will  be  deter 
minative  for  the  rest  of  her  life.  And  if  ever  you  find 
John  huddled  under  a  rug,  shuddering  from  the  exhaustion 
of  alcoholic  excesses,  defeated,  abdicating  under  the  broad 
est  power  of  attorney  his  lawyers  know  how  to  draw,  you 
will  be  safe  in  prophesying  that  this  is  the  end  of  John 
Williamson.  But  Joseph  Greer  and  his  daughter  are  ac 
tuated  by  a  livelier  principle,  kinetic,  not  static ;  the  river, 
not  the  reservoir.  They  may  come  crashing  down  over 
the  falls — but  they  make  their  way. 

Something  about  like  this,  though  not  formulated  in 
quite  these  terms,  was  the  conviction  Henry  Craven  found 
Jennie  abiding  in  when  he  talked  with  her  about  Joe  for 
the  first  time  after  the  capitulation.  This  was  not  until 
the  very  end  of  November.  He'd  been  seriously  ill  with 
bronchitis — and  glad  to  be — for  three  weeks.  It  was  not 
upon  Joe,  however,  that  their  conversation  began. 

She  had  greeted  him  with  a  double  handshake  and  a 
spontaneous  revelation  of  her  pleasure  in  seeing  him  about 
again,  and  her  concern  over  his  illness.  He  flushed  at  her 
friendliness  and  said  as  he  took  the  armchair  she  pulled  up 
for  him,  "I  ought  to  have  said  my  say  before  I  let  you 
shake  hands  with  me.  Before  I  've  finished  you  may  want 
to  take  it  back."  He  wouldn't  be  laughed  out  of  this, 
either. 

He  took  three  envelopes  from  his  pocket ;  one  of  them  he 
told  her  was  his  resignation  of  his  office  as  treasurer,  and 
one  his  resignation  as  director.  These  he  passed  over  to 
her.  The  third  he  kept  in  his  hand.  "About  the  direc 
torate,  I  don 't  care, ' '  he  said.  ' '  I  '11  leave  it  with  you  and 
if  you  want  to  keep  me  on  for  a  while,  to  avoid  having  only 
a  minority  of  the  board  left,  why  I'll  be  glad  to  serve. 
Whenever  you  want  to  make  up  a  new  board,  you  can  just 
fill  in  the  date.  But  the  other  resignation,  as  treasurer, 
I've  dated  as  of  November  first,  and  that  you  must  ac 
cept.  I'd  have  got  out  before  if  I'd  been  free  to  do  so." 

Really  there  was  no  room  for  argument  about  this;  the 
company  in  its  clip-winged  condition  couldn't  afford  a 


480         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

treasurer  at  a  thousand  dollars  a  month.  She  was  hor 
ribly  unhappy  about  it,  all  the  same,  and  after  a  troubled 
moment  of  hesitation  she  broke  out : 

' '  Henry,  don 't  mind,  please,  but — what  are  you  going  to 
do?" 

He  smiled  rather  dryly,  after  telling  her  he  didn  't  mind. 
"I  thought  for  a  while  that  I  was  going  to  have  the  satisfac 
tion  of  doing  something  decent  at  my  own  expense,  but  it 
doesn't  seem  to  be  coming  out  that  way.  Mr.  McGregor — 
he 's  the  president  of  our  bank,  you  know,  came  to  see  me  on 
his  own  hook  night  before  last,  to  see  if  I  wanted  to  come 
back  to  my  old  job  with  them.  The  succession's  rather 
broken  down,  it  seems,  with  poor  Baxter's  death  and  Lar- 
sen  going  to  New  York,  and  they  don't  see  any  one  to  put 
in. 

' '  It  was  Mac 's  own  idea,  you  see.  John  didn 't  even  know 
he  meant  to  ask  me.  Mac 's  just  a  professional  banker,  and 
he  'd  never  have  come  to  me  unless  he  'd  thought  I  was — as 
good  as  he  could  get.  So  I  said  I  'd  take  it,  then  and  there. 

"John  was  surprised — and  seemed  a  little  annoyed — 
when  I  told  him  about  it.  He  said  their  idea  had  been  to 
give  me  the  same  job  I  'd  had  here,  in  the  new  company.  I 
guess  I  made  it  plain  to  him — though  it 's  very  hard  for  me 
to  say  some  things  to  John — that  I  didn 't  want  anything  to 
do  with  the  new  company.  Anyhow,  he  asked  me,  with  that 
smile  of  his,  you  know,  if  that  applied  to  owning  stock  in  it. 
I — I  suppose  you'll  find  it  hard  to  believe,  but  I  had  to 
ask  him  what  he  meant  by  that. 

"He  said  he'd  put  the  proceeds  of  the  sale  of  my  stock 
in  the  old  company — all  but  five  shares  so  that  I  could 
stay  on  here  as  director — into  the  new,  but  that  of  course 
I  needn't  go  in  unless  I  liked.  I  told  him  I  didn't,  and 
thought  that  was  the  end  of  it. — At  least  .  .  . 

"Jennie,  when  a  man's  been  kind  to  you  for  half  your 
life — the  kindest  person  you've  ever  known,  and  that's 
John,  you  can't  say  things  to  him  as  you'd  say  them — on 
general  principles.  I  tried  to  make  myself  believe  he  un 
derstood.  But  this  morning,  in  the  mail,  I  got  John 's  check 


BELOW  THE  FALLS  481 

for  thirty-seven  thousand  dolla7-s,  with  a  letter  from  Rollie 
Mill  saying  it  was  what  was  due  me  from  the  sale  of  my 
stock  in  the  Greer  Company.  I  went  round  to  his  office 
but  I  couldn't  even  see  him.  All  I  could  get  out  of  Rollie 
was  that  it  was  perfectly  straight  bookkeeping ;  he  'd  figured 
it  out  for  himself. 

""Well,  that's  what's  in  this  other  envelope,  Jennie.  I 
feel  as  if  it  was — blood-money.  Something  I'd  sold  Joe 
for.  And  if  there's  any  way  it  can  be  used  for  him,  I  want 
you  to  take  it  and  use  it. ' ' 

She  told  him,  terribly  embarrassed  by  a  fear  she'd  break 
down  and  weep  over  him,  that  there  was  no  such  use  for  it. 
' '  Joe  isn  't  broke, ' '  she  assured  him.  ' '  He  '11  even  get  quite 
a  decent  little  income  out  of  the  Greer  Company,  and  he's 
got  more  or  less  besides  in  various  things.  You  take  that 
check,  first  thing  to-morrow  morning,  and  buy  liberty 
bonds  with  it ! 

"And  don't  go  on  feeling  guilty  about  it,  either.  You 
didn't  sell  him  out.  He  said  to  me,  when  I  saw  him,  elec 
tion  night,  that  he  had  never  expected  you  to  tell  him  any 
thing.  ' '  And  after  spending  a  few  minutes  more  upon  him 
in  argument  and  reassurance,  she  exclaimed,  out  of  a  full 
heart,  ' '  Oh,  Henry,  I  'm  glad  you  're  back  in  the  bank !  It 
makes  one  less  person  I  have  to  worry  about,  anyhow." 

He  had  begun  to  smile  over  the  touch  of  exasperation 
which  was  unmistakably  mingled  with  her  good  will  for 
him,  when  he  saw  in  a  flash  that  she  wras  seriously  worrying 
over  some  one  else.  He  recalled  the  look  he  had  sur 
prised  in  her  face  the  instant  before  she  greeted  him.  It 
was  not  hard  to  guess  who  this  other  was. 

"Is  it  something  new  about  Joe?"  he  asked.  "Some 
thing  worse?" 

It  was  a  long  while  before  she  spoke,  and  then  she  did  not 
answer  his  question.  "I'm  glad  you  came  in,  Henry.  I 
guess  you're  the  one  person  I  can  talk  this  over  with.  I'm 
going  to  have  dinner  to-night  with  Trix  and  her  husband. 
They're  in  town  and  it's  their  wedding  anni 
versary.  I've  got  to  make  up  my  mind  what  to  say  to  her 


482       JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTEE 

about  it,  or  whether  to  say  anything.  Of  course  he's  her 
father,  and  .  .  . 

"You  see,  Joe's  disappeared  from  that  place  Doctor 
Bennett  took  him  for  his  cure.  Just — vanished.  With 
out  leaving  a  trace. — Well,  of  course,  that's  the  way  Joe 
would  do  it  if  he  did  it  at  all." 

"How  long   ago?"   Henry   asked. 

"Tuesday;  after  breakfast,  some  time.  They  notified 
Doctor  Bennett  that  night,  and  he  came  straight  around 
to  me.  Four  days  ago,  that  is,  you  see." 

"Four  days,"  Henry  repeated  somberly.  "He  couldn't 
vanish,  could  he?  You'd  think  somebody  would  have 
seen  him  in  that  time,  unless — oh,  I  suppose  you  must  have 
thought  of  it,  too.  There's  a  lake  right  near  that  place, 
isn't  there,  Jennie?" 

"Thought  of  his  having  killed  himself,  you  mean? 
That's  what  Doctor  Bennett  is  nearly  out  of  his  head 
about. — That's  one  of  the  things.  He  never  did  that, 
Henry.  I'm  perfectly  sure  he  didn't.  No,  that  isn't 
feminine  intuition.  I  knew  he  meant  to  do  this  before  he 
started.  He  had  me  bring  him  a  hundred  and  fifty  dol 
lars  in  currency  that  morning,  on  the  quiet." 

"It  strikes  me  as  rather  funny  you  did  that,"  Henry 
remonstrated. 

She  gave  a  short  laugh.  "It  didn't  strike  Bennett  as 
funny.  He  pretty  near  took  off  my  head.  But  I'd  like 
to  know  why  I  shouldn't  have  done  it.  Joe's  not  a  crim 
inal  nor  a  maniac.  He  wouldn't  have  gone  to  that  place 
at  all  if  he  hadn't  been  too  tired  to  argue  about  it.  He 
can  cure  himself  in  his  own  way.  Why,  Henry,  he  quit 
drinking  for  a  whole  week  down  there  in  New  York,  right 
in  the  thick  of  everything.  Then  something  happened  to 
him — he  didn't  tell  me  what — and  he  began  again.  I 
think  he's  gone  away  to  cure  himself  now.  Anyhow, 
he'd  never  have  taken  a  hundred  and  fifty  dollars  if  he'd 
meant  to  jump  into  the  lake.  You  can  see  that." 

"What's  being  done  to  find  him?"  Henry  asked. 

The   muscle   in  Jennie's  jaw  defined   itself.     "Not   a 


BELOW  THE  PALLS  483 

thing,"  she  said.  "That's  what  Bennett  and  I  have  been 
fighting  about.  I  won't  have  it,  Henry!  If  he  wants  to 
disappear,  it's  his  own  business.  There's  none  of  us  has 
a  right  to  start  a  hue  and  cry  after  him.  He  can  go  where 
he  likes,  and  come  back  when  he  gets  ready.  Of  course 
it 's  hard  for  the  people  who  are  fond  of  him,  but  he  never 
did  think  much  about  things  like  that.  For  all  I  know, 
there  may  be  a  few  people  that  he  wouldn't  mind  having 
believe  he'd  drowned  himself.  There's  a  streak  of  that 
in  Joe.  He  isn't  perfect.  But  it  would  never  occur  to 
him  that  you  or  I  or  Trix  would  think  he  had  done  that ; 
and  the  only  thing  for  us  to  do  is  to  wait  until  he  comes 
back." 

"What  does  Beatrice  think  about  it?"  Henry  asked 
dubiously.  "Of  course  if  she  agrees  with  you,  there's 
nothing  to  be  said." 

"Well,  there  you  are,"  Jennie  confessed  miserably. 
"That's  why  I  hate  to  go  to  dinner  with  them  to-night. 
You  see,  Trix  doesn't  know.  She  doesn't  know  anything, 
I  mean.  About  Joe's  breakdown,  or  what  happened  to  the 
business,  or  the  sanitarium." 

"You  can't  mean  to  go  on  keeping  her  in  the  dark!" 
The  idea  horrified  Henry.  "Anyhow,  you  couldn't  if  you 
wanted  to.  She's  sure  to  find  out." 

' '  Doctor  Bennett  would  tell  her  in  a  minute,  of  course, ' ' 
Jennie  admitted.  "And  she  could  give  him  all  the  au 
thority  he  needs  for  starting  a  search.  But  he  doesn't 
know  where  she  is.  That  made-up  name  she  uses  when 
she  does  exhibition  flying  at  fairs  and  things  wouldn't 
mean  anything  to  him,  if  he  happened  to  see  it.  And 
she's  going  to  California  in  a  day  or  two.  She's  got  a 
contract  to  do  some  stunts  for  the  movies." 

She  went  thoughtfully  on,  overriding  Henry's  hardly 
articulate  protest :  "  If  I  could  be  sure  I  could  make  her 
see  it  my  way,  and  that  she'd  go  ahead  as  if  nothing  had 
happened,  I'd  tell  her.  But  I  can't  be  sure.  When  Trix 
takes  the  bit  in  her  teeth,  she's  just  as  hard  to  manage  as 
Joe  himself.  She  adores  him,  and  if  she  got  the  idea  that 


484         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

he  was  down  and  out — wandering  around,  like  a  lost  dog, 
you  know  ..." 

Her  voice  broke  over  that  and  the  tears  came  up  into 
her  eyes,  but  she  went  resolutely  on.  "If  she  got  that 
idea,  she'd  drop  everything  and  try  to  find  him;  and  the 
worst  of  it  is,  she'd  most  likely  succeed.  It  would  be 
about  the  worst  thing  that  ever  happened  to  Joe,  if  she 
did.  He  made  me  promise  I  wouldn't  tell  her,  too.  I 
guess  that  settles  it."  She  drew  a  long  breath  and 
leaned  back  in  her  chair.  "Well,  I  have  talked  it  through, 
anyhow,  Henry,"  she  concluded.  "Much  obliged." 

She  came  back  to  Henry's  own  affairs  when  he  rose  to 
go,  gave  him  both  hands  again,  and  wished  him  luck. 
"This  office  won't  seem  like  the  same  place  without  you," 
she  said. 

""Well,  that,"  he  confessed,  with  one  of  his  funny 
flashes  of  audacity,  "has  been  a  consideration  that  helped 
reconcile  me  to  the  change." 

"You  mean,"  she  asked,  not  quite  so  surprised  as  she 
pretended  to  be,  "that  you  are  glad  of  a  chance  to  get  away 
from  me?" 

"Yes,"  he  said  boldly.  "From  you  in  your  official 
capacity.  I  think  perhaps  seeing  me  out  of  office  hours 
exclusively,  you  will  begin  to  forget  what  a  preposterously 
poor  business  man  I  am." 

She  told  him  bruskly  that  this  was  nonsense ;  but  he  had 
the  satisfaction  of  seeing  her  blush. 

That  was  a  dreary  winter  for  Jennie,  and  would  have 
been  hardly  endurable  but  for  the  companionship,  out  of 
office  hours,  of  Henry  Craven.  They  were  much  together, 
especially  after  Margaret  returned  to  Italy  in  January. 
They  went  to  most  of  that  season's  plays  together;  dined 
at  least  as  often  as  once  a  week,  sometimes  in  odd  little 
restaurants,  sometimes  in  Jennie's  flat.  They  talked  life 
over  endlessly;  ideas,  people,  their  own  experiences 
and  states  of  mind.  Sometimes,  but  not  often,  they  talked 
of  Joe,  of  whom  in  all  those  months  nothing  had  been 
heard. 


BELOW  THE  FALLS  485 

Finally,  along  in  the  spring,  Henry  asked  her  to  marry 
him. 

He  did  it  out  of  a  clear  sky  rather,  a  little  desperately 
(perhaps  the  expectation  of  his  sister  Margaret's  return 
from  Italy  within  a  fortnight  nerved  him  against  fur 
ther  procrastination),  one  night  as  Jennie  was  driving  him 
home  in  her  Ford  from  a  play.  It  was  a  comedy  which 
Jennie  hadn't  enjoyed  very  much — her  sense  of  humor  was 
not  her  strongest  point — about  an  abysmally  stupid  woman 
who  by  dint  of  industrious  meddling  and  doing  everything 
wrong,  miraculously  brought  everything  out  right  for  her 
distracted  husband. 

"I  suppose,"  Jennie  said  indignantly,  as  they  drove 
over  the  bridge,  "there  are  plenty  of  successful  busi 
ness  men  who  would  be  just  as  infatuated  over  a  fool  of 
a  woman  like  that  as  he  was. ' ' 

"Well,"  Henry  said,  "I'm  not  a  successful  business 
man.  You've  got  to  admit  that.  So  I  ought  not  to  be 
suspect."  He  didn't  say  another  word  until  after  they 
had  crossed  Chicago  Avenue.  Then  he  declared,  "Yon 
know  what  I'm  trying  to  say,  Jennie.  I  want  you  to 
marry  me.  Do  you  think  you  could  make  up  your  mind 
to  that?" 

"Oh,  wait!"  she  cried,  with  a  gasp.  And,  indeed,  it 
was  not  the  sort  of  question  to  ask  a  lady  who  wras  driv 
ing  through  that  pelting  traffic. 

He  told  her  in  his  kindest  way,  not  to  mind.  There  was 
no  hurry. 

She  threaded  the  little  car  through  the  south-bound 
stream  at  the  mouth  of  his  street,  and  pulled  up  at  the 
curb  before  his  door.  Then  she  folded  her  arms  over  the 
wheel  and  for  a  moment  put  her  head  down  upon  them. 
"I'm  all  right,"  she  told  him.  "Only,  you  gave  me  sort 
of  a  shock,  Henry." 

"Why,  I've  been  getting  round  to  it  for  months,"  he 
protested.  "You  must  have  seen  that!" 

She  owned  she  'd  thought  of  it  once  or  twice.  ' '  But  only 
as  a  thing  that  couldn't  possibly  happen.  I  guess  I'm  as 
great  a  fool  about  this  sort  of  thing  as  .  .  .  " 


486 

"As  I  am  about  business.  Well,  then,  that's  all 
right." 

She  said  indignantly  this  wasn't  what  she  meant.  It 
was  the  woman  in  the  play  she  had  been  thinking  of.  "All 
tke  same,"  she  went  on,  getting  herself  together,  "I  think 
I'm  right  about  this.  You've  never  had  much — well,  ro 
mance.  You've  had  no  chance  for  it.  Not  since  you  were 
a  boy  and  fell  in  love  with  your  cousin  Violet.  Now,  with 
your  sister  making  money  hand  over  fist,  and  your  own 
income,  and  your  job  at  the  bank,  you're  free.  You  ought 
to  fall  in  love  with  somebody  ten  or  fifteen  years  younger 
than  I  am;  pretty  and  mysterious  and  exciting  and  all 
that." 

He  laughed.  "When  it  comes  to  mystery — for  me — 
you  leave  this  crop  of  flappers  nowhere.  You're  the  most 
wonderful  person  I've  ever  known,  Jennie." 

She  caught  her  breath  at  that,  and  laughed  in  turn,  but 
he  did  not  continue  on  this  tack.  His  own  feelings  were 
clear  enough,  he  said.  He  knew  what  he  wanted.  But 
the  point  was,  what  did  she  want.  How  did  she  feel  about 
him? 

"I  don't  know,"  she  said  soberly.  "I  like  this  pretty 
well  as  it  is.  I  don't  believe  I  could  ever  want  anything 
very  different  unless — well,  unless  I  was  sure  you  did. 
Unless  you  wanted  something  different — terribly." 

"I  don't  believe  I'll  have  any  trouble  convincing  you, 
Jennie, ' '  he  told  her.  And  then,  with  his  familiar  con- 
siderateness,  since  he  saw  she  was  shaken  and  distressed  by 
doubts,  he  covered  her  hands  with  his,  and  said  she  wasn  't 
to  worry  about  it,  anyhow.  She  could  have  all  the  time 
she  wanted  for  making  up  her  mind. 

"You're  a  dear,  Henry,"  she  said,  with  a  catch  in  her 
voice.  "If  I  ever  marry  anybody,  it  will  be  you." 

He  was  well  pleased  with  the  beginning  he  had  made, 
and  he  looked  forward  to  going  up  to  her  flat  to  lunch 
with  her  the  following  Sunday,  in  the  fearful  hope  that 
the  matter  might  be  explicitly  and  finally  settled  after 
all,  before  Margaret  got  home.  But  on  Saturday  after- 


BELOW  THE  FALLS  487 

noon,  within  a  few  minutes  of  his  homecoming  from  the 
bank,  she  amazed  him  by  appearing,  in  a  radiance  of  un- 
suppressed  excitement,  at  his  own  door. 

"I  couldn't  wait  for  to-morrow,"  she  said.  "I  could 
hardly  wait  to  get  here.  I  almost  spoiled  it  by  telephoning. 
Henry,  I  've  heard  from  Joe — a  long  letter.  He 's  all  right 
again;  just  as  I've  always  said  he'd  be." 

It  was  strange  that  Henry's  heart  should  have  sunk  at 
that,  but  it  did.  "Oh,  that's  wonderful!"  he  said. 
"Come  in  and  sit  down,  and  tell  me  about  it." 

"I  don't  believe  I  can  sit  down,"  she  confessed.  But 
she  made  him  do  so,  in  an  easy  chair,  and  light  his  pipe. 
Impatiently,  she  squeezed  the  tears  out  of  her  eyes.  "I 
don't  know  if  I  can  talk  either.  You  see,  he's  the  old  Joe 
again,  as  he  hasn't  been — oh,  hardly  since  you've  known 
him,  Henry.  That  letter,  it  was  like  a  boy's  letter — a 
schoolboy's.  Some  of  the  things  in  it,  you  don't  know 
whether  to  believe  or  not.  He  never  cared  whether  you 
did  believe  him  or  not.  Only  laughed. 

"He  told  me  the  way  he  disappeared  from  that  place 
where  Doctor  Bennett  took  him.  He  was  walking  around 
the  grounds,  thinking  he  would  just  walk  away  as  he  was 
— he  had  that  money  with  him,  of  course — when  he  heard 
a  couple  of  men  on  the  other  side  of  a  clump  of  bushes 
talking  Spanish — a  sort  of  Spanish — and  he  sat  down  and 
talked  with  them.  They  were  part  of  a  gang  that  was 
building  a  road,  a  concrete  road,  right  by  the  sanitarium. 
They  were  being  worked  awfully  hard,  trying  to  finish 
that  stretch  before  frost. 

"One  of  them  didn't  like  it  and  said  he  was  going  to 
quit.  Joe  gave  him  some  money,  and  promised  him  some 
more,  to  go  to  the  village  and  buy  him  some  common  clothes 
and  a  razor,  and  things,  and  bring  them  back  there.  And 
then  he  shaved  off  his  beard  and  dressed  in  the  working 
clothes,  and  went  out  and  got  a  job  with  the  gang,  having 
everything  interpreted  for  him  into  Spanish  before  he 
would  understand  it.  He  was  right  there  through  all  the 
excitement  over  his  having  disappeared.  He  must  have 


488         JOSEPH  GREEK  AND  HIS  DAUGHTER 

enjoyed  that — though  the  work  pretty  near  killed  him,  he 
said. 

"It  only  lasted  three  or  four  weeks  before  they  had  to 
stop  on  account  of  the  frost,  but  he  got  interested  in  roads 
by  that  time.  Thinking  about  them.  Thinking  about  get 
ting  something  that  would  be  better  than  concrete.  So  he 
went  down  to  New  Jersey  to  some  of  the  big  chemical 
plants  there,  and  looked  around  and  asked  questions.  Joe 
can  get  anybody  to  tell  him  anything,  of  course.  And 
then  he  began  to  get  an  idea. 

"He  has  set  up  a  little  laboratory  of  his  own — I  don't 
know  where  he  got  the  money,  but  he  always  kept  some 
handy — and  he  thinks  he's  on  the  trail  of  what  he  is  looking 
for.  Something  that  will  be  cheaper  than  concrete,  and 
just  about  as  easy  to  lay — when  you  know  how  to  do  it; 
and  as  good  for  horses  as  it  is  for  motor-cars.  He 's  almost 
ready,  he  says,  to  go  at  it  in  a  big  way.  If  he  gets  it,  it 
will  be  about  the  bigge.st  thing  there  is.  He  says  his  name 
is  going  to  be  spelled  with  a  small  letter  some  day,  just  the 
same  as  Macadam's  was." 

"You  don't  suppose  he  has  got  hold  of  a  thing  like  that, 
do  you?"  Henry  asked. 

She  turned  upon  him  sharply.  "When  he  says  he  has 
it,  he'll  have  it,"  she  retorted.  "It  will  be  all  there,  from 
beginning  to  end — and  it'll  work.  His  flax  process 
worked,  didn't  it?" 

Henry  blinked,  and  acknowledged  that  it  did.  Then 
he  laid  down  his  pipe,  and  clasped  his  hands.  Jennie  was 
no  longer  looking  at  him. 

' '  Oh,  I  don 't  care  whether  it  works  or  not,  as  long  as  he 
does — his  mind,  I  mean — in  the  old  way.  If  that  doesn't 
turn  out  right,  he'll  find  something  else.  He  says  that  by 
fall,  he  thinks,  he'll  need  me  down  there.  He  will  when 
we  really  get  going,  anyway." 

It  was  then  she  looked  around  at  Henry  Craven,  sitting 
very  still  in  his  easy  chair,  his  hands  between  his  knees. 
She  uttered  a  little  cry  of  dismay,  stood  gazing  at  him  for 
a  moment  without  moving,  and  then  as  the  tears  came, 
she  went  over  to  him  without  a  word  and  kissed  him. 


BELOW  THE  FALLS  489 

"  Oh,  I  understand, ' '  he  told  her.  ' '  Please  don 't  feel  un 
happy  about  it.  I  haven't  a  doubt  you're  right.  And 
nothing  is  spoiled  that  we've  got." 

"I  love  you  better  than  I  do  him,"  she  said,  turning 
away  again.  ' '  At  least  I  think  I  do.  I  've  never  dreamed 
of  marrying  him,  and  never  would — even  if  he  wanted  me 
to.  But  in  another  way — a  sort  of  office  way — I've  been 
married  to  him,  all  along.  And  now  he  '§  coming  back,  and 
wants  me  again  ..." 

Once  more  he  told  her  in  his  kindly  reassuring  voice  that 
it  was  all  right  and  that  he  understood,  but  something  in 
his  look  filled  her  with  panic,  and  she  said  with  great 
emphasis  that  she  must  be  running  on  at  once.  He  made 
no  effort  to  detain  her,  but  at  the  door,  as  he  held  it  open, 
he  asked: 

"How  about  lunch,  to-morrow?  Am  I  still  invited  on 
the  old  terms?" 

' '  Of  course ! ' '  she  said,  and  he  shut  the  door  behind  her 
rather  quickly. 

THE  END 


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